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LIBRARY

MASTERPIECES OF

IMPRESSIONISM

& POST-IMPRESSIONISM

THE AnNENBEKG
COLLECTION

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
MAY 21- SEPTEMBER 1Z 1989

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART WASHINGTON
MAY 6-AUCUST 5, 199Q

LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART
AUGUST 16- NOVEMBER 11, 1990

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART NEW YORK
JUNE 4-OCTOBER 13,1991

THE EXHIBITION IS MADE POSSIBLE AT

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

BY THE MAY DEPARTMENT STORES COMPANY.

MASTERPIECES OF

IMPRESSIONISM

& POST-IMPRESSIONISM

theAnnenberc
collection

COLIN B. BAILEY & JOSEPH J. KISHEL

& MARK ROSENTHAL

with the assistance of VEERLE THIELEM ANS

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART

Cover: Detail of La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle) by Vincent Van Gogh (p. 103)

In Philadelphia, the exhibition, publication, and related programs were
supported by grants and contributions from the Pennsylvania Historical and
Museum Commission, The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Florence Gould
Foundation, The Bohen Foundation, CIGNA Foundation, Philip and Muriel
Berman, Ed and Martha Snider, and The Women's
Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In Washington and Los Angeles the exhibition was made possible by a grant from GTE Corporation.

This book was produced by the Publications Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Edited by Jane Iandola Watkins, with the assistance of Molly B. C. Ruzicka and Mary Patton

Photography by Graydon Wood

Composition by Cardinal Type, New York

Color separations and printing by A. Pizzi, Milan

Printed and bound in Italy

© 1989 by the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Additional material © 1991 by the Philadelphia Museum of Art
26th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway, P.O. Box 7646
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19101

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission,
in writing, of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS C ATA LOGI NG -I N -PU BL1C ATION DATA

Bailey, Colin B.

Masterpieces of Impressionism & Post-Impressionism: The Annenberg
collection/Colin B. Bailey & Joseph J. Rishel & Mark Rosenthal,
with the assistance of Veerle Thielemans. 224 pp.

"This book is published on the occasion of an exhibition at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, May 21— September 17, 1989"— T.p. verso.

Itk hides bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-87633-079-0 (pbk.)— ISBN 0-8109-1545-6 (Abrams)
1. Impressionism (Art)— France— Exhibitions. 2. Post-
ImpK-ssionism 1 \i 1) I- rain c Fxhibitions. 3. Art, French—
Exhibitions. 4. Art, Modern— 19th Century— France— Exhibitions.
5. Art, Modern— 20th Century— France— Exhibitions. 6. Annenberg,
Walter H., 1908- —Art collections— Exhibitions. 7. Annenberg,
Lee— Art collections— Exhibitions. 8. Art— Private collections—
( lalifornia — Rancho Mirage— Exhibitions. I. Rishel, Joseph J.
II. Philadelphia Museum of Art. III. Title. IV Title:
Maslci pic< cs of Impressionism Post-1 mpi essionism.
N6847.5.I4B35 1989 89-3978
759 4°74'748ii— dc20 CIP

1 he May Department Stores Company is pleased to sponsor "Masterpieces
of Impressionism & Post-Impressionism: The Annenberg Collection" at The Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art, continuing our longstanding commitment to the arts.

It is a distinct honor to be associated with such an important exhibition and
institution and to provide the opportunity for these masterpieces to be viewed.
We are grateful to the Ambassador and Mrs. Annenberg for sharing their
outstanding collection. It will bring much pleasure to everyone who visits it at
the Metropolitan Museum.

David C. Farrell

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
The May Department Stores Company

N o art lover can fail to be deeply impressed by Walter Annenberg's collec-
tion. His sense of quality has led him to acquire only works of major beauty and
significance. These standards of excellence have enabled him, over the years,
not only to collect works of great importance but to forge a coherent and
homogeneous ensemble, where the quality of the whole is as high as that of the
components.

Seeing the works in the paradise-like setting of Rancho Mirage, surrounded
by the luscious beauty of the landscape, which Walter Annenberg has also
created, is an experience not to be forgotten. But seeing them in the context of
great museums, close to many other masterpieces, will be exhilarating: great
works of art also like to be together!

May I add, as a Frenchman, that I am deeply moved by the interest in French
art displayed by the Annenberg Collection. Nowhere will one have a better
image than at this beautiful exhibition of what Impressionism and Post-Impres-
sionism have brought to the world.

I am happy to think that so many art lovers will thus be able to enjoy some of
the finest works created by French artists.

Merci, Monsieur Annenberg! And good luck to the paintings, which have
found a haven in such worthy hands.

Emmanuel de Margerie
Ambassador of France
May 1989

CONTENTS

FOREWORD
CATALOGUE

Camille Corot

Eugene Boudin

Edouard Manet

Edgar Degas

Berth e Morisot

Henri Fantin-Latour
' plerre-auguste renoir

Claude Monet

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Georges Seurat 68
Paul Cezanne 72

2 Paul Gauguin 92

4 Vincent van Gogh 100

10 Edouard Vuillard 112

12 Pablo Picasso 118

22 Henri Matisse 120

26 Pierre Bonnard 122

32 Georges Braque 124

48 DOCUMENTATION 129

62 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 212

Andrew Wyeth (American, born 1917)
Walter H. Annenberg, 1978

lns( ribed: 1978 Walter Annenberg by his friend Andrew Wyeth
Tempera on Masonite, 32-Vs x 28'/* inches

FOREWORD

It is A rare opportunity and a distinct honor to present to the public in four
cities across the United States a collection of works of art of such remarkably
concentrated quality. Since their first acquisitions made in the early 1950s,
Walter and Lee Annenberg have steadily and thoughtfully assembled a group of
pictures that together give evidence of the achievement of the masters of Impres-
sionism and Post-Impressionism equaled by very few collections in private hands
today. The addition in 1983 of fifteen works from the distinguished collection of
Mrs. Enid Annenberg Haupt brought new depth to the representation of each
artist. In 1989, a pivotal painting from the early career of Picasso, At the Lapin Agile,
was acquired, and with that single stroke, gave the collection its most poignant and
powerful link between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The following year a
third Fantin-Latour was added to the collection as well as Braque's joyously complex
studio interior of 1939. The names represented in the collection are magisterial —
Cezanne, Degas, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso— but the individual objects
yet more telling. From the formidable grandeur of Van Gogh's La Berceuse (Woman
Rocking a Cradle) to the irresistible charm of Renoir's Daughters of Catulle Mendes,
from the broadly brushed immediacy of Monet's Path through the Irises to the subtly
reasoned strokes of Cezanne's most panoramic view of Mont SainteAfictoire, the
Annenberg Collection provides virtually infinite opportunity for delight and con-
templation. Thirteen of the works in this exhibition were shown at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art in the summer of 1963, and thirty-two were the subject of a warmly
received exhibition in 1969 at the Tate Gallery in London during Ambassador
Annenberg's years at the Court of St. James's. The appearance of the collection in its
current, astonishingly powerful form constitutes an occasion of great importance
for the four museums that have the privilege of presenting it in Philadelphia,
Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York over a period of three years.

It should be noted that the Annenbergs' keen interest in art ranges from Chinese
T'ang dynasty tomb figures to the sculpture of Auguste Rodin and Jean Arp, from
superb portrait paintings of eighteenth-century America to the art of their friend
Andrew Wyeth, whose grand and austere image of Walter Annenberg serves as
frontispiece to this foreword. What is presented here, then, is but one aspect of a
shared enthusiasm for beautiful and significant works of art.

This exhibition and the book that accompanies it are the result of extensive
collaborative efforts on the part of many members of the staff of each of the
participating museums. Initiated at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the project
would not have been possible without the energetic enthusiasm and thorough
scholarship of Joseph J. Rishel, Curator of European Painting and Sculpture before
1900, who oversaw its realization, and that of his colleague Colin B. Bailey, then
Assistant Curator in that department (now Curator of Painting at the Kimbell Art
Museum, Fort Worth, Texas), who collaborated on every aspect. In the preparation
of the exhibition and the writing of the catalogue, in which a number of very great
works of art are given their first extended discussion, they realized a remarkable
achievement within a relatively short span of time. The many valuable contributions
of scholars and institutions to the extensive research for this project are acknowl-
edged by the authors elsewhere in this book, and their thanks are here most warmly
seconded. Mark Rosenthal, former Curator of Twentieth-Century Art at the Phila-
delphia Museum of Art, contributed thoughtful entries on three modern paintings
in the collection; and Veerle Thielemans provided skilled research assistance to the
authors. The complex production of successive editions of this handsome volume,
designed by Joseph Del Valle, was overseen by George H. Marcus, Head of Publica-
tions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Jane Watkins, Senior Editor, with
customary thoroughness and devotion to detail.

The myriad arrangements necessary to present these splendid works of art to the
public were coordinated among the Philadelphia Museum's departments of the
Registrar, Conservation, Installations, Packing, Special Exhibitions, and Public
Relations in concert with colleagues at sister institutions: in Washington, Charles S.
Moffett, Senior Curator of Paintings and coordinating curator for the exhibition;
D. Dodge Thompson and his staff in the department of exhibitions, particularly
Ann Bigley Robertson; Gaillard F. Ravenel and Mark Leithauser, department of
design and installation; Mary Suzor, office of the registrar; and Elizabeth A. C. Weil,
corporate relations. In Los Angeles, Elizabeth Algermissen, Assistant Director for
Exhibitions, and Philip Conisbee, Curator for European Painting and Sculpture,
and in New York, Mahrukh Tarapor, Assistant Director, Gary Tinterow, Engelhard
Associate Curator of nineteenth-century European paintings,, and Susan Alyson
Stein, Special Exhibitions Associate, were responsible for overseeing preparations
and installing the exhibition.

The presentation of this exhibition has been supported by an impressive group of
public and private resources whose combined generosity has made such an ambi-
tious undertaking possible. The exhibition has been generously supported at the

National Gallery of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by a grant from
the GTE Corporation. With an admirable track record in support of major exhibi-
tions, it is characteristic that GTE should have chosen one of this importance with
which to be associated. To James L. Johnson, Chairman, and Charles R. Lee,
President, go our sincere thanks for their continuing support of the National
Gallery exhibition programs and those of its partners.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is deeply grateful to the Pennsylvania Historical
and Museum Commission, The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Florence Gould Foun-
dation, The Bohen Foundation, CIGNA Foundation, and The Women's Committee
of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as to Philip and Muriel Berman, and Ed
and Martha Snider for support that launched this project in May of 1989.

The exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is made possible by The May
Department Stores Company. We gratefully acknowledge this generous support.

In these days of extraordinary prices on the art market and rising costs, which
challenge all museums in their goals to preserve, exhibit, and enhance their trea-
sures, it is truly gratifying to salute two great collectors who are also great public
benefactors. Their profoundly generous gifts of much needed funds for acquisition,
gallery renovation or other crucial purposes have made a vital difference to a
number of museums, including our own, and their gifts of great works of art such as
Henri Rousseau's Tiger in the Rain at the National Gallery, London, the superb gilt
bronze eleventh-century Khmer figure at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and
the drawings from two sketchbooks by Cezanne, which can now be savored in the
context of the master's paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will continue to
enchant the public of the future.

With this exhibition, above all, we celebrate the vision embodied in the adventure
of forming a great collection and, together with Walter and Lee Annenberg, we
celebrate in turn the extraordinary vision and mastery of two generations of
Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters in France.

Robert Montgomery Scott
President

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Anne d'Harnoncourt

The George D. Widener Director

Philadelphia Museum of Art

J. Carter Brown

Director

National Gallery of Art

Earl A. Powell, III
Director

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Philippe de Montebello
Director

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

CATALOGUE

Camille Corot

FRENCH, 1796-1875

ThE Curious Little Girl, 1850-60

OIL ON BOARD, l6\4 X 11% INCHES

H E IS always the strongest, he has foreseen everything." Degas's
reaction to the paintings of Camille Corot at a sale of the artists work
in 18831 suggests the depth of admiration then felt by French pro-
gressive artists for the famous painter. Berthe Morisot and Camille
Pissarro listed themselves as his pupils, while his impact on Gauguin,
perhaps second only to that of Delacroix, continued well into Gau-
guin's Tahitian period. This profound admiration was based almost
entirely on Corot's powers as a landscape painter, since the numerous
figure subjects he did throughout his life were little knc n until the
beginning of this century. Corot showed only two figure subjects
during his lifetime: A Monk at the Salon of 1840 and A Woman
Reading in 1869 (fig. 1),2 preferring to keep such works in his studio
or to give them away to his pupils and friends. The critic Theophile
Gautier was perplexed by A Woman Reading, although he ultimately
found it "pleasing for its naivete and color in spite of the faulty
drawing of the figure."3 Others were more astute, including Degas
(who owned seven paintings by Corot, including an early figure
study)4 when he gave this assessment in 1887: "I believe Corot paint-
ed a tree better than any of us, but still I find him superior in his
figures."5 Four figures (out of a total of forty-four works) were shown
in Paris at the Exposition Universelle in 1889, 6 and an appreciation
of this aspect of Corot's work slowly began to emerge. The American
painter John La Farge (1835-1910) explained in 1908 to the students
of the Art Institute of Chicago: "In the same way that the subtleness
and completeness of his landscapes were not understood on account
of their very existing, the extraordinary attainment of Corot in the
painting of figures is scarcely understood to-day even by many of his
admirers and most students. And yet the people he represents, and
which he represents with the innocence of a Greek, have a quality
which has skipped generations of painters."7

It was not until 1909, when a group of figure pieces was shown
alone at the Salon d'Automne in Paris, that a broad critical under-
standing began to develop. The dealers who were taking up the
cause of the new generation of painters pursued these Corots also,
and sold them with the same conviction they held for Degas and
Cezanne, Picasso and Braque.8

This enchanting painting at one time bore a label on the reverse
reading "Given to my Friend M. Camus, fils. C. Corot, 24 February
iH(>4."9 (The picture is dated to the previous decade by Robaut.)10
Camus was almost certainly the landscape painter George Camus,
who first exhibited as a student of Corot in the Salon of 1869, where
he was listed as living In Arras. Corot often visited and worked in
Arras, drawn there by his closest friend, the lithographer and paint-
er Constant Dutilleux (1805-1865). Camus, who does not seem to

have made much of a reputation for himself as a painter, owned at
least three works by Corot, including two that were gifts from the
artist."

Within the category of paintings of children, numbering about
forty— genre figures in the spirit of Chardin (fig. 2)— there is a
particular charm that has suggested to some writers parallels be-
tween these works and qualities celebrated in Corot's own character:
innocence, unquestioning goodwill, directness, and a nearly saintly
purity. As early as 1845 Baudelaire had praised his naivete, linking
this quality with the ineloquent originality of his work.12

Whereas the older girls and women who posed for Corot were
professional models, the children who appear in his works — except
for street urchins painted on his trips to Italy — seem to have been
part of his extended family, the offspring of close friends.13 His
children, as exemplified here, are knowingly alert, if slightly vulnera-
ble; and as the title of this painting, The Curious Little Girl, suggests,
they are part of an animated life that indicates a degree of human
insight absent from his grander images of adolescents and young
women (fig. 3). Yet, for all its expressive effectiveness, and in a
decade that often took the readily exploitable charm of children to
an extreme (fig. 4), this picture has neither the sentimentality nor
the gentle melancholy that pervades nearly all his adult figures,14 just
because of the artist's even, solemn, and altogether tender presenta-
tion of this disarmingly mischievous child.

It is a picture created through a seemingly uncalculated, won-
drously harmonious and rich means. The dark colors are applied
densely and stand above the surface in slight relief, the gradation
into the shadows as subtle and precise as the highlights on the skirt.
The patch of light that falls under the girl's right arm holds with
remarkable solidity to the plane of the ocher wall, beautifully worked
within a fine harmony, as are the gently stippled strokes on the trees
and sky beyond. Colors outside Corot's basic palette of ocher, blue,
green, and flesh tones are introduced with great discretion, first
logically, as in the lavender thistle and the dry, yellow bloom below,
and then with harmonic independence, as in the four salmon strokes
on the wall, three to the left, one to the right, with complete assur-
ance of his coloristic control of the entire surface.

These are the qualities that Baudelaire understood better than
any other early critic. In reviewing the landscape paintings at the
Salon of 1859, he wrote that Corot "has the devil too seldom within
him. However inadequate and even unjust this expression may be, I
chose it as approximately giving the reason which prevents this seri-
ous artist from dazzling and astonishing us. He does astonish— I
freely admit— but slowly; he does enchant— little by little; but you
have to know how to penetrate into the science of his art, for with
him there is no glaring brilliance, but everywhere an infallible strict-
ness of harmony. More than that, he is one of the rare ones, the only
one left, perhaps, who has retained a deep feeling for construction,
who observes the proportional value of each detail within the whole,
and (if I may be allowed to compare the composition of a landscape
to that of the human frame) t he only one who always knows where to

place the bones and what dimensions to give them His eye, which

is keen and judicious, is more concerned with what establishes har-
mony than with what emphasizes contrast."15

Eugene Boudin

FRENCH, 1824-1898

On the Beach, Dieppe, 1864

OIL ON PANEL, 12»/a X ll\4 INCHES

On and off after 1850, Eugene Boudin retained a studio in
Paris during the winter months, where he developed into finished
works the drawings, watercolors, and oil sketches he had done out of
doors during more clement weather. Yet, for all his absorption with
life in the capital and with the swift developments in painting that
were taking place there, he often yearned for his native Le Havre
and the surrounding area of Normandy, the source for much of his
art. In June 1869, detained in Paris, he wrote to a family friend: "I
daren't think of the sundrenched beaches and the stormy skies, and
of the joy of painting them in the sea breezes."1

This deep desire to reabsorb himself in nature— particularly the
Norman coast— points up the critical role Boudin would play in the
history of French landscape painting. By working directly from na-
ture and attempting to retain the freshness of spontaneous vision in
his finished oils, he introduced a type of naturalistic painting from
which there could be no retreat, as Baudelaire was among the first to
note. That he generously shared this joy he took in his native region,
and in painting it as directly as he knew how, first with Courbet and
Whistler (fig. 5), and then, most critically, with the young Claude
(then Oscar) Monet, gave him the distinction, in later criticism, of
being the "precursor of Impressionism," a distinction that, while
certainly just, tends to eclipse his essentially modest yet enchantingly
fresh and vivid pictures.

Born near the harbor at Le Havre, Boudin developed as an artist
wit h a strong sense of his own limitations, setting for himself the goal
to do justice to nature in a way that he first learned from Constant
Troyon (1810-1865), for whom he acted as a studio assistant, while
closely heeding the works of Millet and Corot. By the late 1850s he
had achieved a style of such individuality that Baudelaire, after a
chance meeting in Le Havre while visiting his mother, wrote a last-
minute insertion to his Salon review of 1859 praising the works he
had seen in Boudin's studio: "On the margin of each of these studies,
so rapidly and so faithfully sketched from the waves and the clouds
(which are of all things the most inconstant and difficult to grasp,
both in form and in colour), he has inscribed the date, the time and
the wind If you have ever had the time to become acquainted with

these meteorological beauties, you will be able to verify by memory
the accuracy of M. Boudin's observations. Cover the inscription with
your hand, and you could guess the season, the time and the wind. I
am not exaggerating. I have seen it. In the end, all these clouds, with
their fantastic and luminous forms; these ferments of gloom; these
immensities of green and pink, suspended and added one upon
another; these gaping furnaces; these firmaments of black or purple
satin, crumpled, rolled or torn; these horizons in mourning, or
streaming with molten metal— in short, all these depths and all these
splendours rose to my brain like a heady drink or like the eloquence
of opium."2

Such full-blown praise did not immediately provide a substantial
audience for Boudin's work, yet he persisted, while sustaining himself
by working in a framing and stationery shop that often showed the
work of local artists, including his, as well as those of the more
famous figures who visited Normandy to paint. It was through this
shop, which showed caricatures by the seventeen-year-old Monet,
that these two artists met; and through this meeting the older artist
set Monet on the path from which he would never veer. "Boudin,
without hesitation, came up to me, complimented me in his gentle
voice and said: 'I always look at your sketches with pleasure; they are
amusing, clever, bright. You are gifted; one can see that at a glance.
But I hope you are not going to stop there. It is all very well for a
beginning, yet soon you will have had enough of caricaturing. Study,
learn to see and to paint, draw, make landscapes. The sea and the sky,
the animals, the people, and the trees are so beautiful, just as nature
has made them, with their character, their genuineness, in the light,
in the air, just as they are.'"3 The boy resisted Boudin's invitation to
come work with him, but finally that summer he acquiesced and
joined with Boudin: "My eyes were finally opened and I really un-
derstood nature; I learned at the same time to love it."4 Monet's
greatest reciprocation to his mentor came years later when he was
probably the means through which Boudin was asked to exhibit with
the Impressionists in their first show, in 1874.

This love of nature, so effectively conveyed to the young Monet,
sustained Boudin throughout his long and productive career. It is
perhaps nowhere more obvious than in this small panel, which
speaks so directly of a specific place and time, and of Boudin's plea-
sure in depicting it. The subject is the sea air itself, and how the sky,
the sea, and the fashionably dressed crowd gathered on the beach
are affected by it. And if there is irony in the foreground couple,
attempting to carry on a conversation in the stiff breeze, it is gentle,
so completely do they seem to partake in the artist's own stated
pleasure at being there at that moment.

.1.1 R

Eugene Boudin

FRENCH, 1824-1898

On the Beach, Sunset, 1865

OIL ON PANEL, l^/e X 2^l/i6 INCHES

During the summer of 1865 Boudin worked on the Norman
coast with Monet, Courbet, and Whistler. To what degree these
encounters affected his new interest in painting on a horizontal
format and, particularly, his absorption with the effects of the light of
the setting sun, is an open question of influences and counter-
influences. However, it was at this point that he began a series of
pictures of fashionable beaches, which he continued with great effec-
tiveness for the remainder of the decade, depicting well-dressed,
upper-class holidaymakers gathered in the last light of day on the
beach at Trouville or Deauville (fig. 6).1 From about 1862, perhaps on
the suggestion of Eugene Isabey,2 he had done beach scenes of these
fishing villages, which had become hugely popular, with their race
track, casino, and what was thought to be the most lovely sands in
France. Visits by the Empress Eugenie and her court only heightened
the rage for these towns, a point not lost on Boudin, who comment-
ed in 1863: "They love my little ladies on the beach, and some
people say that there's a thread of gold to exploit there."3

If he seems overly mercenary by this comment, it was a subject
about which he was ambivalent. In August 1867, having just returned
to the fashionable section of the coast, north of Le Havre, from the
most isolated area— still the purview of pious peasants and fisher-
men—farther down the coast, he wrote: "I have a confession to
make. When I came back to . . . the beach at Trouville, which I used to
find so delightful, ... [it] seemed nothing more than a frightful mas-
querade. One would have to be a near-genius to make anything of

this troop of idle 'poseurs.' After spending a month among a breed of
people doomed to the rough labour of the fields, to black bread and
water, to see again this group of gilded parasites, with their haughty
airs, makes me feel contempt and a degree of shame at painting such
slothful idleness. Fortunately, dear friend, the Creator has spread a
little of his splendid and warming light everywhere, and what I
reproduce is not so much this world as the element that envelops it."4
The following year he would temper his rage at social inequities:
"The peasants have their painters, Millet, Jacque, Breton; and that is
a good thing Well and good: but, between you and me, the bour-
geois, walking along the jetty towards the sunset, has just as much

right to be caught on canvas, to be brought to the light They too are

often resting after a day's hard work, these people who come out
from their offices and from behind their desks. If there are a few
parasites among them, aren't there also people who have carried out
their allotted labour? There's a serious and irrefutable argument."5

Here, any conflicts of conscience he may have felt later are put
aside by his love for an enveloping light. In this painting of 1865, a
dense crowd is pulled up nearly to the water's edge at dusk. A few
swimmers remain in the sea, although the bathing wagons are now
pulled back from the tide. Two little girls play at the right, while the
two women under parasols seem more caught up by their conversa-
tion than by the grand effect of the sky. But the crowd to the left, the
man in profile setting the mood, seems to have fallen silent, staring
out to the horizon as if in anticipation of the shift from yellow to red
that is about to take place as the sun meets the sea— in an effect of
temporal progress that, as Baudelaire noted in 1859, Boudin had
mastered completely. It is a more hrrmoniously composed picture
than the previous one, more contained and reserved in color and
more blended in execution. The heroic boldness of Courbet and the
tonal subtleties of Whistler are not seen here, nor are the brilliant
bravura brushstrokes of the young Monet. It is calmer, more tem-
pered, and— for all his railing against the participants— wondrously
kind and sympathetic to a mutual participation in the moment.

Eugene Boudin

FRENCH, 1824-1898

Princess Metternich on the Beach,
c. 1865-67

OIL ON PAPERBOARD, MOUNTED ON PANEL, Il9/i6 X
9'4 INCHES

This little work is curiously unique, even in the context of
Boudin's immense production. It is painted on a paper board that
had been randomly scored, both horizontally and vertically, perhaps
with a matt knife. Boudin took up this object, probably a studio scrap
(only later mounted on panel), laid a thin coat of white gesso over the
surface, and painted one of the most freshly spontaneous sketches of
his entire career. The oil is applied with gouachelike directness. This
work falls somewhere between his brilliant watercolors and his fin-
ished paintings, both of which often depict /fashionable women on
the beach, although rarely with such gusto. In its alert observation of
high fashion and Parisian style it compares with the similar sketches
of Constantin Guys (fig. 7). In the freedom of execution and continu-
ous animation of surface it ranks nearly with the oil sketches of
Manet. Within Boudin's work it stands alone and seems to have never
been used for a larger or more finished work.1

The central figure has always been identified as Princess Metter-
nich (1836-1921), wife of the Austrian ambassador to France and
one of the more noteworthy women at the court of Napoleon III.
Boudin certainly would have seen the princess often at the resorts on
the Norman coast; she was frequently there, often in company of her
close friend the empress. In comparison with contemporary photo-
graphs (fig. 8), this identity holds.

As the Goncourt brothers, who were not fond of the Empress
Eugenie and her circle, caustically noted in their journal in 1864:

"Her, always, her! In the street, at the Casino, at Trouville, at Deau-
ville, on foot, in a carriage, on the beach, at children's parties, at balls
for important people, always and everywhere, this monster who is
nothing and has nothing, who has neither grace nor spirit nor benef-
icence, who has only the elegance that she can buy from her dress-
maker for one hundred thousand francs a year."2 Part of their dis-
taste for her came from the fact that the princess was small, very
slight of build, and quite plain, with a face that they had earlier
described as having a bluntly "turned-up nose, lips like a chamber
pot, and the pallor of a figure from a Venetian masque."3 Yet the
princess was a woman of considerable style, wit, and self-knowledge
— declaring herself to be the "best-dressed monkey in Paris"4— who
contributed greatly to the diplomatic success of her husband,
brought a kind of gaiety to the rather dreary formality of court life,
and, at least on one occasion, championed against formidable odds
the operas of Wagner, whom many critics condemned, immediately
identifying them with the new, controversial movement in painting.

Her appearance, perhaps just because of its combination of home-
liness and immense chic, attracted Degas in one of his strangest
portraits (fig. 9), done after the fall of the Second Empire in 1870
and the departure of the Metternichs from Paris, from a photo-
graph showing the princess with her husband in i860.

Her attraction for Boudin could not have been more different. He
has turned her blunted features in complete profile, reserving his
perceptions for the billowing complexity of her dress and the way
the back of her head takes the light, just as her companion's profile is
observed as her veil is caught in the wind. The horizon, for once in
Boudin, does not lie distant and still; its undulations seem to take
part in the same current of air that pulls about the princess's dress;
this, like the thinly suggested sailboat to the right, recalls the oil
sketches of Whistler, although that much more aesthetic artist would
never have taken such conspicuous pleasure in light and the laying
on of paint.

r JJR

Edouard Manet

French, 1832-1883

Mme Manet at Bellevue, 1880

oil on canvas, ^/4 x 233^ inches

Incapacitated by severe rheumatism, Manet left Paris in the sum-
mer of 1880 for the neighboring suburb of Bellevue, renowned for
its agreeable villas and for its waters.1 He had first attended the
hydropathic clinic there in September 1879, and in June 1880 rented
a villa on the route des Gardes from the opera singer Emilie Ambre,
"the neighboring prima donna and 'chatelaine,'" whose portrait he
had started in September 1879 and would finish during this second,
protracted stay.2 Manet and his family remained at Bellevue until the
beginning of November 1880, and in spite of an arduous regime of
showers and massages — and Manet's marked distaste for country life
— the stay was among the most productive of his last years.3

Manet confined his painting in these months to open-air studies
made in the garden of his rented villa. In a letter to the engraver
Henri Guerard, husband of his pupil Eva Gonzales, he once com-
plained that his day's work had been interrupted by the threat of a
storm: "Therefore we had to put away the easels."4 Nor is it clear that
such a sustained period of painting in plein air entirely suited him.
Toward the end of his time at Bellevue he wrote to Zola: "The
Bellevue air has done me a world of good... But, alas! naturalist
painting is more in disfavor than ever."5

Indeed, Mme Manet at Bellevue exemplifies Manet's deep-seated
ambivalence toward the aims and techniques of the Impressionist
school he was widely credited to have fostered. Seated on a bentwood
rocking chair, her hands resting on her lap, Suzanne Manet's gaze is
hidden under the large brim of a straw hat and her face is covered by
its veil. The paint is applied very freely: over the thin, gray-cream
ground that makes up her dress, patches of white, gray, and blue are
laid on in crisscross strokes to suggest the flickering of light over her
ample form. By contrast, the foliage in the background is rendered
in dense, oily patches of greens of varying intensity, and the serpen-
tine line of the rocking chair is a passage of bravura impasto. Manet's
touch changes again in the more delicate handling of Suzanne's face
and hat: strokes of blue, peach, and white create the edge of the brim
of her hat, and the flesh tones darken to model her chin and cheek.
He is at pains to record certain effects of light: Suzanne's hands, in
direct sunlight, appear almost orange compared to the plum-flesh
tones of her protected face. Equally, there are touches of red in the
background— against the edge of the garden chair, in the foliage
above Suzanne's hat— to add vibration to the greens.

But in themselves the ambient effects of sunlight and the play of
shadows are not of overwhelming interest to Manet. Nor are the
particulars of this suburban site. The thick green bushes with the
sunlight upon them are merely background— freely handled, but syn-
optic, and with few concessions to having been directly observed. In
this the portrait resembles Manet's Reading L'll lustre 10), painted
the previous year: the general flatness of the composition and the
disjuncture between sitter and setting are common to both works.6

Yet, if Manet's handling is undeniably Impressionist, he arrived at
the statuesque and immobile presence of his wife through several

stages. Suzanne's profile first appears as a sketch illustrating Manet's
letter to Henri Guerard (fig. 11).7 The pose is repeated, almost identi-
cally, in a black wash drawing on graph paper (fig. 12),8 while a third
drawing, in ink (fig. 13), has Suzanne's face turned directly to the
right, the pose she assumes in the finished painting.9 Lastly, an
unfinished oil sketch for the painting (fig. 14), which was photo-
graphed in 1883 and has subsequently disappeared, demonstrates
how Manet worked out this composition, building up the elements
from the left: only Suzanne's hat and the back of her chair are visible,
and her features are not yet described.10 Given the notorious slow-
ness and deliberation with which Manet worked, this succession of
preparatory works is not surprising. It is also worth noting that
Manet adjusted the profile in the finished painting by letting the veil
cover Suzanne's face; in all of the drawings the veil is lifted and her
profile is more directly observed. The lowering of the veil deepens
the sense of his sitter's impenetrability.

At the same time that Manet worked on the portrait of Suzanne,
he painted that of his mother, Eugenie-Desiree Manet (1811-1885),
sitting in the same garden, facing left and concentrating on the
needlework she holds in her hand (fig. 15). Preparatory drawings for
this appear juxtaposed with those of Suzanne in two of the sheets
mentioned above, and the final portrait of his mother, which Duret
called an "etude," while even freer than that of Suzanne, might well
be considered a pendant to it." The two paintings have almost the
same dimensions, and the compositions respond to one another in a
general way. The pairing nicely alludes to the cordial relations be-
tween the two women, who together comfortably maintained Manet's
impeccably respectable household on the rue Saint-Petersbourg.

Mme Manet at Bellevue would be Manet's last painting of his wife,
who had already appeared in at least eleven of his oils.12 Suzanne
Leenhoff (1830-1906), born in Delft, was the daughter of an organ-
ist and chapelmaster and was herself an accomplished pianist. She
and Manet married in October 1863, although their liaison had
begun some thirteen years earlier. It is generally accepted that Leon
Koella Leenhoff, born to Suzanne in January 1852, was Manet's son;
in polite society he was known as her brother.13 How Suzanne Leen-
hoff and Edouard Manet first met is still open to speculation; the
dictum that she gave Manet piano lessons is questionable, since
Manet at eighteen was old to be taking instruction of this sort.14
Despite such ambiguities, Suzanne was warmly accepted by Manet's
family (after the death of his father in September 1862) and by his
literary and artistic friends. "It would appear that his wife is beauti-
ful, very fine, and a great musician," wrote Baudelaire on the occa-
sion of Manet's sudden wedding in October 1863. 15 Suzanne visited
the dying Baudelaire and played Wagner to him; she corresponded
with Zola (to whom she was devoted) and Mallarme; and after
Manet's death in 1883 she transformed their house at Gennevilliers
into a shrine in his honor.16

Comparison of this painting with a photograph of Suzanne (fig.
16) illustrates the degree of simplification in Manet's last portrait of
her. Her broad features, so lovingly rendered the year before in Mme
Manet in the Conservatory (fig. 17), are now entirely suppressed. Her
sensual mouth and frozen profile suggest an almost sphinxlike in-
scrutability, while her elegant hands are reduced to a few hasty
strokes of vermilion. Just as the precise nature of his relationship
with Suzanne was carefully masked during his lifetime, Manet seems
intent upon maintaining a certain distance in this gentle yet enig-
matic portrait of his wife.

1()

Edgar Degas

FRENCH, 1834-1917

Italian Woman, 1856-57
watercolor and pencil on paper,

8'4 X 4'/8 INCHES

During his first year in Italy, between October 1856 and July
1857, Degas treated the almost obligatory subject of Italian women
in local costume in several informal watercolors and drawings. Such
colorful studies from life had almost become part of the art student's
repertory; a generation of pensionnaires at the French Academy in
the Villa Medici in Rome would complement their studies after Old
Masters and the live model with sketches of the inhabitants of Rome
and the surrounding countryside.1 Less than two years after his arriv-
al in Italy, the twenty-four-year-old Degas would repudiate such works
for their banality: "I am not mad about this well-known Italian pic-
turesque," he noted in July 1858; "whatever moves us no longer owes
anything to this genre. It is a fashion that will always be with us."2

Initially, however, his responses to the "Italian picturesque" dif-
fered little from those of his more conventional contemporaries.
Before reaching Rome, he had already recorded a woman in peasant
costume in Sorrento, outside Naples (fig. 18), annotating his sketch
with details of how she wore her hair, "braided into a crown around
bandeaux."3 Once in Rome, he joined the French students of the
Villa Medici, where he attended life-drawing classes in the evening,
in portraying peasant women from Trastevere and the surrounding
countryside in their traditional dress.

In this delicate and rather tentative watercolor, Degas first drew
the figure and her attributes in pencil; the underdrawing of her
apron, the folds of her skirt, and the oval of her face can still be seen
through the colored washes. In applying color he simpified even
more: her right foot, the outlines of which are clearly visible, is
now lost in the gray shadow cast by the stone block. Similarly, the
darker patches that describe the shadows on her right arm, neck,

and chin are almost formulaic. As in the Sorrento study, Degas
resolutely avoided pretty detail: the bearing of this peasant woman
is taut and proud; her hands rest elegantly on the handle of her
pitcher; and her spare features and simple dress enhance her dignity
of comportment.

It was not in such sheets, however, that Degas affirmed his inde-
pendence from academic convention; this emerged only in the paint-
ings of old beggar women, dated to 1857, tnat break with both the
picturesque and the sentimental.4 Degas's watercolors remain re-
markably close to those of his contemporaries, the sculptor Henri-
Michel Chapu and the painters Jules-Elie Delaunay and Jacques-
Francois Clere — prix de Rome winners in whose circles he moved at
this time. In 1857 he recommended a striking male model to Chapu
and traveled to Arrezo and Perugia in the company of Clere and
Delaunay.5 It was only after his momentous introduction to Gustave
Moreau, eight years his senior, in early 1858, that Degas assumed the
latter's disdain for such pensionnaires, "decent young fellows, who
consider themselves artists, but are crassly ignorant."6

In addition to participating in the evening drawing classes at the
Villa Medici, Degas may have joined students such as Chapu and
Delaunay on sketching expeditions in the Campagna and Traste-
vere.7 Before Degas's arrival in Rome, Chapu had drawn a very
similar Italian woman in a letter to his parents dated June 19, 1856,
with the annotation, 'An Italian woman's costume as seen in the
Campagna and in Rome at Trastevere." A larger watercolor by Chapu
shows a model not unlike that of Degas carrying a jug on her head.8
Finally, a watercolor by Delaunay in Nantes (fig. 19) bears direct
comparison with Degas's Italian Woman, although the bulk of De-
launay's figure and the heaviness of her hands serve to emphasize the
instinctive refinement and delicacy in Degas's approach to his sitter.

In his very popular travelogue Rome Contemporaine, published in
1861, Edmond About gave an account of the regular influx of peas-
ants into Rome each Sunday, when they would congregate around
the Farnese palace looking for work or buying and selling provisions.
The peasant women, he wrote, "dressed in bodices, red aprons, and
striped jackets, protect their tanned faces with headdresses of pure
white linen. They are all worth painting, either for the beauty of

their features or the simple elegance of their bearing."9

v 6 6 GBB

Edgar Degas

FRENCH, 1834-1917

The Dancer, c. 1880

pastel, charcoal, and chalk on paper, 12vs x

lg1^ INCHES

In pastels or paint, the artist excels in silhouettes of little dancers
with sharp elbows," commented Paul Mantz, not altogether approv-
ingly, in April 1880.1 And, indeed, the standing dancer who adjusts
her sash — her back half turned to the viewer, her angular elbows
jutting out — is a ubiquitous figure in Degas's repertory. She makes
her first appearance in his ballet paintings of 1873 m tne back-
ground of The Dance Class (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C.) and her last, in 1898, in the right foreground of the Ballet Scene
(fig. 20), having provided the subject for a range of pastels and
drawings in the intervening years.

The pastel Dancer relates very closely to The Dance Lesson of
1878-79 (fig. 21), the first in a series of paintings depicting dance
rehearsals that employ a distinctive horizontal format.2 The pastel is
almost identical to the central figure in the painting, a standing
dancer in contre-jour, tying her sash. The slight differences between
the two dancers are significant, however. Whereas in the painting
the girl's pointed nose and rather heavy jowls give her character, in
the pastel her profile is much less sharply defined. Here it is at an
even greater remove from the incisive chalk and pastel drawing of a
head that is one of a number of preparatory studies for the pose and
for which Nelly Franklin, an English dancer, modeled.3 A similar
attenuation is found in the act of adjusting her sash. In the painting
the girl practically grapples with the bow, the ribbon firmly between
her hands, while in the pastel her hands have moved behind the bow,
adjusting something we cannot see.

It seems likely, therefore, that The Dancer was made after The Dance
Lesson, and that both painting and pastel rely for the standing figure
on a third, independent prototype. As early as 1873, Degas had
made a spirited gouache drawing of a Standing Dancer Fastening Her
Sash (fig. 22), which he seems not to have included in either of the
great paintings of dance classes to which this drawing and others like
it relate.4 It has been suggested that a charcoal drawing of a Standing
Dancer Fastening Her Sash (fig. 23), which is squared for transfer to
another composition, and which was first published as a study for the
standing figure in The Dance Lesson and its later variants, might well
have been the starting point for both the painting and the pastel.5
There are also arguments for its closer relationship with two later
paintings: in the charcoal drawing the dancer wears a shawl over
whi< h her hair hangs loose— features connecting it with Dancers in
the Rehearsal Room with a Double Bass (The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York), painted at least three and possibly six years after The
Dance Lesson;6 the shawl also appears (with the chignon of the earlier
works) in an even later variant, Dancers at the Foyer (The Contrabass)
( I he Detroit Institute of Arts).7 However, the effects of light on the
dancer's arms and elbows in the squared charcoal drawing relate
more closely to The Dance Lesson and The Dancer than to either of the

later variants, in which the upper half of the standing figure is
shown in deep shadow.

What, then, is the status of the pastel Dancer, and how should it be
dated? The delicate vertical grids that encase the dancer, at left by
the toe of her slipper and at right by her elbow through the tarlatan
of her tutu, are plumb lines that Degas often used to establish the
position of the main figure, and do not indicate that the drawing was
made for transfer.8 Conceived as a single-figure study, the addition in
the background of three diminutive dancers with broad features
transformed the setting of the composition into a rehearsal room of
considerable size. This perspectival device appears for the first time
in Degas's work of the late 1870s and is most brilliantly employed in
The Dancing Lesson of 1880 (fig. 24), to which this pastel should be
compared.

A dating of around 1880 is also supported by an examination of
Degas's handling in The Dancer. The neutral, gray paper is lightly
covered by flesh-pink pastel, which establishes a somewhat muted
tonality. Color is then applied in delicate hatching, concentrated hue
appearing only on the trailing black neck ribbon; the knot of the
blue sash, slightly off center; and the little blue bow on the figure's
left shoulder, which gleams against the white strap. The spareness of
this pastel— both in its handling and in its construction of space— re-
calls, from a considerably lower register, the magnificent Dancer
Resting (private collection) and Dancer with a Fan (fig. 25), which date
from about 1879 and 1880, respectively.9

Degas's preference for the rehearsal room allowed him to show his
young dancers engaged in almost every activity except dancing.
They exercise and rest; adjust their costumes and rub their tired
limbs; scratch their backs and sit with their mothers. Underlying
these informal and often witty depictions are a nobility and a sympa-
thy that should not be underestimated. Not only are the particulars
of the rehearsal room edited out in the pastel, but Degas's apparently
straightforward observation of the young dancer adjusting her sash
is itself partial and fabricated. For one major element in the dancer's
dress is rigorously suppressed in this study, as in countless others like
it; there is no indication of the dancer's knee-length calico bloomers,
yet they were standard and considered "de rigueur in ballet circles
until the turn of the century."10 Only occasionally, in Dancers Practic-
ing at the Barre, 1876-77 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York) and The Ballet Class, 1881 (fig. 26), for example, does Degas
choose to show this undergarment, and then with a fastidiousness
and discretion that suggest bashfulness. Far more frequently he
simply chooses not to see the ubiquitous bloomers.

"It is all well and good to copy what one sees," Degas confided to
George Jeanniot, in a passage that has become famous, "but it is
much better to draw only what remains in one's memory. This is a
transformation in which imagination and memory collaborate.""
This often-quoted passage has unexpected significance here. Degas
was not the only painter of the ballet during the Third Republic: the
suites of etchings and lithographs produced in the 1890s by Paul
Renouard (1845-1924) unhesitatingly plagiarized and trivialized
Degas's compositions.12 Whenever Renouard depicted the dance
class in session, his insinuating, coquettish dancers display their un-
dergarments unashamedly (fig. 27). Prurient and vulgar, these litho-
graphs nonetheless have a documentary fidelity that Degas dis-
dained. He preferred, rather, in these studies, to reaffirm the
ancestry of his dancers in the sisterhood of Nike.

Edgar Degas

FRENCH, 1834-1917

Race Horses, 1885-88

PASTEL ON PANEL, llVs X l6 INCHES

Race horses and jockeys, even more than dancers, occupied
Degas throughout his long career as an artist.1 Paul-Andre Lemoisne
catalogued some ninety-one works in this category, spanning the
period from i860 to 1900 — a number that did not include Degas's
equestrian waxes and bronzes— and they embrace a range of sizes
and mediums.2 As with the Paris Opera, the spectacle of the turf
gave Degas the base material from which to forge images of modern
life in an alloy that fused references to the art of the past with details
observed from life and scrupulously documented. But more than
any other of his subjects, this was a genre that fed upon itself and
spawned countless variations and adjustments. From a repertory
established very early, Degas proceeded to select individual jockeys
and rearrange them, to repeat poses and refine them, until this
hermetic world lost all connection with the reality of the race track.
During the 1890s Degas's jockeys would emerge liberated from
Baudelaire's "heroism of everyday life" to lead their horses calmly
through undefined pastures, untroubled by this displacement and
uneager either to reach their destination or to return home.

This diminutive composition of Race Horses, which falls toward the
end of the first phase in this development, is immediately distin-
guished by its unusual support. It is pastel, and not oil, on panel: the
wood here, possibly light mahogany, is the kind that might be used
for cigar boxes.3 Although pastel on panel is not a unique combina-
tion, it is extremely rare in Degas's oeuvre, and testifies to his contin-
uing pleasure in experimenting with techniques and supports.4

Using the amber, grainy surface of the wood to suggest a mackerel
sky, as well as the hills in the background, Degas applied the pastel
lightly, at times tentatively. He varied the degree of pressure on his
crayon: at its most insistent, it achieves the bright sheen of the
jockeys' silks, but it is much more active in describing the closely
hatched, wispy grass that occupies most of the foreground. Here,
the point of the pastel moved rapidly, in vertical zigzags that occa-
sionally scratched the wood. Some scratch marks are visible on the
underbelly of the central horse; however, in painting the riders and
horses, Degas's penmanship changed again. He allowed the surface
of the wood to stand as the dominant color of the horses, building up
their forms with strokes of orange red, gray, black and white, with
traces of green spilling over from the surrounding grass.

There is also a lovely variety in the postures of the horses: the
three jockeys in the foreground make up a closely linked unit, bound
together not only in the interlocking of hooves, but also by the
movement of the jockey in lime green, who turns around to catch the
eye of his two companions. The serenity of this group contrasts with
the rearing horse in the background, whose bridle is taut as his rider
pulls him in— the single element of disorder in this otherwise quiet
scene. The distant church tower with its attendant cluster of build-
ings and the pathways cutting across the hills, traced in white, create
a sort of no-man's land, midway between the race track of Long-
champ and the empty, barren hills of the late works.

Controlled and effortless, Race Horses brilliantly disguises its abun-
dant antecedents. The composition and every figure within it can be
traced back through a variety of studies and finished works — a char-
acteristic of the inbred morphology unique to this subject.5 Bennozo
Gozzoli's fresco in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence is the
starting point for the pastel; Degas made several copies after the
fresco on Gustave Moreau's encouragement between 1859 an<^ i860.6
The central horse in profile assumes the pose of the steed in Degas's
copy of Gozzoli's Journey of the Magi (fig. 28), a pose that Degas later
studied from life in a sanguine drawing made in the mid-i86os (fig.
29) and one that would be much used in his race-horse composi-
tions.7 The horse and jockey with their backs to the spectator derive
from another detail of the Gozzoli fresco, Degas's copy of The Patri-
arch Joseph of Constantinople and His Attendants (fig. 30), a pose
that Degas would also study from life several times in the following
decade. The prototype for the rear-view horse and jockey in Race
Horses is probably the central rider, squared for transfer, in his Three
Studies of a Mounted Jockey (fig. 31), where the configuration of the
horses' limbs matches exactly.

Yet the figures in the pastel had already appeared in a variety of
fully worked compositions made during the 1860s and 1870s. The
godfather to the entire series, The Gentleman's Race: Before the Start
(Musee d'Orsay, Paris), begun in 1862, reworked in c. 1882, included
several figures that Degas would use again and again.8 There was
still another stage in the process that led to the pastel Race Horses.
The rider in profile and the jockey seen from behind were brought
together in the Race Horses (fig. 32), an oil on panel, nearly the same
size as the pastel, that was begun in 1871-72 and reworked in
1876-78, and in which the rearing horse in the background ap-
peared for the first time. This was not only the testing ground for a
more ambitious composition — The Racecourse, Amateur Jockeys (Musee
d'Orsay, Paris), begun in 1876 and completed in 1887 — lt was a'so the
original design for the composition of the Annenberg pastel.9

Degas continued, almost obsessively, to rework and refine these
individual elements. Although the bearded jockey in the center had
been used in many race-horse paintings, Degas studied the position
of his right thigh and upright bearing in several sheets of a notebook
used between 1881 and 1884, 10 long after he painted Race Horses (fig.
32), in which this figure had again appeared. These notebook
sketches, as well as the exquisite drawing of his friend Ludovic Lepic
as a jockey (fig. 33), were used in the elaboration of the Annenberg
Race Horses.11

Race Horses formed part of the prestigious collection of Theodore
Duret (1838-1927), the first great advocate and historian of the
Impressionist movement. Of the eight works by Degas that appeared
in the Duret sale of March 19, 1894, four works may be identified
from the detailed descriptions in the sale catalogue.12 In addition to
this pastel, Duret owned Degas's Conversation at the Milliner's (Na-
tionalgalerie Berlin [East]), Ballet Rehearsal (Yale University Art Gal-
lery, New Haven), and Before the Start (formerly with Paul Rosenberg,
Paris).13 It is not clear how or when Duret acquired these works,
which date from the second half of the 1880s, although he pur-
chased one of his dancers from Durand-Ruel for 2,000 francs.14 His
decision to sell this great collection at a time when Impressionist
paintings were beginning to command respectable prices infuriated
Degas. Duret's high reserves were not always met, and Degas rejoiced
in such disappointed expectations.15

C BB

Edgar Degas

FRENCH, 1834-1917

At the Milliner's, 1881

pastel on five pieces of wove paper backed

with paper and mounted on linen,

27*4 X 27'4 INCHES

Xhis is perhaps the most tender and enigmatic of the group of
pastels in the milliner series (see fig 34).1 Although this pastel may at
first appear to show a milliner helping a client with her hat, we are,
in fact, presented with two women of similar status — a mother and
daughter, perhaps, or two sisters — who are seated together on a
diamond-patterned sofa. One holds a straw bonnet on the head of
her companion, who looks to the right, presumably to judge the
effect of the hat in a mirror we cannot see. The women wear almost
identical costume: drab brown dresses, belted at the waist. The
woman on the left, hatless, has an opulent lace fichu, through which
the ruff of her blouse can be seen, and wears close-fitting long suede
gloves. The second woman, whose auburn braids peek out from
underneath her hat, has a blue velvet collar and is trying on a bonnet
trimmed with swags of blue ribbon and a yellow flower. To the left of
the two women, a net curtain covers a window in which shapes of
blue and yellow appear, perhaps reflecting their accessories. In the
background, across the parquet floor, a small sofa with slip covers
gleams in front of a full-length mirror. Next to it is a round vase with
a tall potted plant, its leaves repeated in the mirror behind the sofa.
The vase is wedged in between another sofa, whose arm we glimpse
at the edge of the composition.

At the Milliner's shares several characteristics of Degas's work of the
early 1880s.2 The figures dominate the picture plane and are caught
in unusual positions: the women's bony elbows punctuate the diago-
nal of the sofa, upsetting the order of the scene, threatening almost
to fall out of the frame. The spectator hovers somewhere behind the
two women, looking down with a "japonisant bird's-eye view" into the
far corner of the sofa.3 And to the blandness of their costume Degas
brings an unexpected chromatic intensity in the yellows of the glove,
bonnet, and flower, and in the blues of the ribbon and collar, colors
reflected in the white fichu and the window beyond.

Yet this startling and self-contained image was developed through
a series of additions and extensions, as examination of the wove
paper shows (fig. 35). Originally conceived on a vertical format 255/s
by lgs/s inches (identical in size to another At the Milliner's [fig. 36],
where the cropping is equally audacious), this pastel may well have
begun as a milliner arranging a hat on a hatstand.4 It is difficult to
imagine Degas contemplating a second figure within the confines of
such a vertical composition, where the gesture of holding the hat

exists almost independently of the accompanying figure and is self-
sufficient. The notion of a second figure must have presented itself
very early on, suggesting the possibilities of a more expansive com-
position. Hence the addition of a large strip of paper (6s/i6 inches) to
the right and the squaring of the pastel with strips added along the
left and upper edges. The pastel now assumed a format comparable
to At the Milliner's, 1882 (fig. 37), for which Mary Cassatt posed.5

If Degas's ideas ran ahead of his instruments ("I felt so poorly
made, so poorly equipped, so limp, yet it seemed that my artistic
calculations were so right"), it is worth stressing that the additive
process in works such as this was inseparable from the realization of
the image.6 Octave Mirbeau perceptively explained this creative
mode in 1884: "You might say that it is not Degas who creates his
compositions, it is the first line or the first figure he draws or paints
that is responsible. Everything unfolds inexorably, mathematically,
musically, if you will, from this first line and first figure, just as Bach's
fugues depend on the initial phrase or initial tone for their develop-
ment."7

Once this radical transformation of both subject and scale was
conceived, it seems that Degas was able to discard his preliminary
ideas effortlessly. With the exception of some hesitation in the area
around the ear and hair of the hatless woman, the new composition
emerged complete: the sureness of Degas's technique and the lucid-
ity of his juxtapositions are a tour de force. There are no known
preparatory drawings or studies for this work, and while the compo-
sition shares several formal qualities common to the milliner series
of 1882-86 — the sharp diagonal recession, the central fulcrum of
the bent arm— the figures of the two women recur in no other work.
At the Milliner's is the most finished of all the milliner compositions.
The pastel is densely applied, with some smudging to suggest shad-
ows on the side of the face of the woman on the right, yet the surface
that Degas achieves is fine and seamless, more uniform and unified
than in At the Milliner's, 1882 (fig. 36), where the pastel, while rich
and thick, is applied more liberally and with less attention to even-
ness of touch.

The highly worked Annenberg At the Milliner's may indeed have
been one of Degas's "articles"— his word for paintings conceived and
executed for the market.8 Yet if it is drav n in his "commercial style,"
Degas's treatment of the subject here is more ambiguous than in any
of the other milliner compositions of the first half of the 1880s.
While the pastel has clear affinities with other works in the milliner
series— in the compositional devices previously mentioned; in the
many similarities in dress and hairstyle with the figures in At the
Milliner's in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (fig. 34); in the
muted tones of the women's dresses, which generally serve to height-
en the color and sumptuousness of the hats and their trimmings— it
also transgresses the conventions of this series at every turn.9 No
milliner is represented, nor are there hatstands, mirrors, or display
of other headwear of any kind. The woman on the left, although
hatless, must be a companion to the other, for only then does the fact
that she is seated become explicable. Shop assistants were not per-

mitted to use the seats provided for clients; in Zola's Au Bonheur des
Dames they are dismissed for nothing less, and it is inconceivable that
a saleswoman, however senior, would have allowed herself such inti-
mate access to a client.10

It is the tenderness of the gesture of the gloved woman, who holds
the hat with infinite patience while looking down solicitously, that
suggests sources for this work far removed from the Grands Magasins
and the realist milieu. Huysmans described Degas's art as "savante et
simple." Degas carried his erudition effortlessly: echoes of Renais-
sance painting reverberate in At the Milliner's.'1 The double profile
and overlapping postures recall Leonardo's unfinished Virgin and
Child with Saint Anne (fig. 38), which Degas had first copied in the
Louvre in 1853. The two women's elegant and spare features, their
angular forms and quiet concentration also suggest kinship with the
serene and noble figures in Ghirlandaio's Visitation (fig. 39), another
work that Degas had known since early manhood and copied during
his apprenticeship in the Louvre.12

That he "bound the past to the most immediate present," in the
words of the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942), was a cre-
ative process remarked upon by many sensitive observers of his art.13
For Mirbeau, his contemporaneity was filtered through the simplify-
ing and synthetic manner of the early Siennese masters.14 But even
earlier, in a review of the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition of 1880,
Charles Ephrussi, a lesser critic, had perceptively praised Degas as
"an estimable draftsman and pupil of the great Florentines, of Lo-
renzo di Credi and Ghirlandaio."15 Ephrussi made these connections
advisedly: in 1882 he acted as the intermediary in the Louvre's
acquisition of the great Botticelli frescoes Giovanna degli Albizzi Re-
ceiving a Gift of Flowers from Venus and Lorenzo Tornabuoni Presented by
Grammar to Prudentia and the Other Liberal Arts.16 His comments are
all the more interesting, however, since it is he who first owned the
Annenberg At the Milliner's; discovering at what point the pastel
entered his collection would help solve the vexed issue of when it
should be dated.17

Charles Ephrussi (1849-1905)— "the Benedictine-dandy of the
Rue de Monceau"— was born to a wealthy Jewish banking and corn-
exporting family in Odessa. Along with his brother Jules, he pene-
trated the highest regions of Parisian society (he had arrived in Paris
in 1871), and his successes with the aristocracy of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain were remarked upon.18 "These Russian Jews, this
Ephrussi family, are terrible," fulminated Edmond de Goncourt,
resentfully, in June 1881, "with their craven hunt for women with
grand dowries and for positions with large salaries Charles at-
tends six or seven soirees every evening in his bid for the Ministry of
Fine Arts."19 If Ephrussi never realized these ministerial ambitions,
he became director and owner of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1885,
by which time he had already established himself as a serious art
historian and collector. Between 1879 and 1882 he assembled an

impressive collection of Impressionist paintings, which boasted
Monet's La Grenouilliere (National Gallery, London) and Manet's De-
parture for Folkestone (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Ephrussi was
one of Renoir's most devoted supporters: he organized, in the artist's
absence, his consignment to the Salon of 1881; he introduced him to
the Cahen d'Anvers family; and he appeared, in top hat and redin-
gote, in the background of Renoir's celebrated Luncheon of the Boat-
ing Party (Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.).With Degas, Ephrus-
si's relations were equally cordial for a while. He may well have
commissioned Degas to paint his portrait; in a letter to Henri
Rouart, dated October 26, 1880, Degas wrote that he was eager to
finish "Ephrussi's painting... for there is some good money to be
made at the end of it and it is badly needed."20 Ephrussi was one of
the few intimates to be invited to Degas's housewarming in his new
apartment on 21 rue Pigalle, in June 1882, as part of a select com-
pany that included the Rouarts, Daniel Halevy, and Durand-Ruel.21
Finally, when Degas applied for a box at the Opera in 1882, it was
Ephrussi who may have smoothed his way with the director and
secretary of that institution.22 Writing to Berthe Morisot in April
1882, Eugene Manet remarked that "Degas has a seat at the Opera,
gets high prices, and does not think of settling his debts to Faure and
Ephrussi."23 This might refer to the unfinished portrait of Ephrussi,
which would remain in Degas's studio and be sold as unidentified in
his posthumous sale, but cannot be connected to any other known
commission for which Ephrussi would have paid in advance.24 We are
quite well informed of Ephrussi's collection at this time through the
correspondence of his former secretary, the symbolist poet Jules
Laforgue (1860-1887), whose nostalgic letters from Berlin vividly
evoke Ephrussi's bedroom lined with Impressionist paintings. La-
forgue had left Paris at the end of November 1881, and in a precious
letter written in Berlin to Ephrussi at the beginning of December, he
recalled "Degas's nervous dancers and his portrait of Duranty," the
former unidentifiable, the latter presumably the Portrait of Duranty,
in pastel (private collection, Washington, DC.).25 Laforgue did not
claim to make an inventory of the collection, and his memory was
not infallible; he did not mention Degas's exquisite General Mellinet
and Chief Rabbi Astruc, 1871 (City of Gerardmer), which Ephrussi
may well have owned by this time.26 But the absence of At the Milli-
ner's in Laforgue's enthusiastic letter is worth noting. Furthermore,
given that Ephrussi's interest in the Impressionists waned as dramati-
cally as it had emerged (in 1887 he would publish the first mono-
graph on the eminently respectable Paul Baudry) and that La-
forgue's letters of 1882 allude to offers made for Ephrussi's Impres-
sionist paintings rather than to works newly acquired, it would seem
that Ephrussi's collecting came to a halt some time in 1882 or 1883.27
The speculation that At the Milliner's entered Ephrussi's collection
after November 1881 (the date of Laforgue's departure from Paris),
but no later than 1882-83, is confirmed with indisputable precision

2()

from an investigation of Durand-Ruel's stock books.28 Tracing the
various references there to the pastel numbered 1923, initially enti-
tled 'A Corner of the Salon," and matching this with the same
inventory number discovered on the back of At the Milliner's, one can
now establish the following chronology. On October 12, 1881, Degas
delivered the pastel entitled 'A Corner of the Salon" to Durand-Ruel
for 1,500 francs, his single largest deposit of that year.29 The pastel
was assigned the stock number 1923 and estimated for sale at 2,000
to 3,000 francs. Six months later, on April 21, 1882, Ephrussi pur-
chased six Impressionist paintings from Durand-Ruel, including
Degass pastel, 'A Corner of the Salon," for which he paid 2,000
francs.30 Almost thirteen years later to the day, on April 24, 1895,
Ephrussi returned to place the pastel— now called "The Conversa-
tion"—on deposit with Durand-Ruel, for an estimated selling price of
15,000 francs.31 The pastel was not sold, however, and on April 7,
1896, Durand-Ruel purchased it for the company for 8;ooo francs,
listing it variously as "The Conversation," 'At the Milliner's," and
"Woman Trying on a Hat," and giving it a sale price of 40,000
francs.32 The pastel remained in the family collection until the 1940s.

Thus, At the Milliner's, executed by October 1881, anticipates by
nearly a year the first of a celebrated group that has been described
as "an exceptionally cohesive unit of work."33 Degas used the two
alternate formats of the Annenberg pastel— the vertical and the
square — in two of the subsequent milliner pastels of 1882 (figs. 36
and 37), for which At the Milliner's becomes a sort of prototype.
Although it cannot claim precedence as Degass first treatment of
the theme, for he had exhibited a milliner, now lost, at the Second
Impressionist Exhibition of 1876, At the Milliner's offered the starting
point for many of the compositional devices that were developed in
this remarkable series.34 Yet in its immaculately finished surface, it
also looked back to such pastels as Women in Street Clothes, c.1879
(Collection of Walter Feilchenfeldt, Zurich) and the Dance Examina-
tion (Denver Art Museum) of approximately the same date. And in
its daring accretions and extensions, it relates to the Portrait of a
Dancer at Her Lesson, 1879, where the same additive process was
at work.35

And what of the subject of this pastel? The range of titles it was
assigned in 1895-96 suggests that the image defied precision even
then. Its first title, 'A Corner of the Salon," was suitably noncommit-
tal, although whether this was of Degas's choosing is not known. If
Degas's imagination was stirred by the fire that ravaged the great
Parisian department store Printemps, in March 1881, an incident
widely reported in the press, and one that laid the seed for Zola's Au
Bonheur des Dames, only coincidence of chronology affirms the link.36

Degas's interest in representing Mary Cassatt and her sister in
fashionable settings may also have had some bearing on the genesis
of this work. Certainly the plain costumes worn by the figures in At
the Milliner's compare well with the subdued dresses worn by the

Cassatt sisters in the series of them posed in the Louvre, and the
fascination with the rear view is common to both. In his letter of
October 26, 1880, to Henri Rouart, Degas mentioned that the
Cassatts had just returned to Paris from Marly, and while Lydia was
in ailing health until her death in November 1882, the possibility of
her sitting for Degas here cannot be entirely ruled out, given the
similarity of both the profile and the long suede gloves in Mary
Cassatt's portrait of Lydia in the Garden (fig. 40), painted in 1880. 37

It is almost easier to state what the pastel is not concerned with
than to attach precise models or messages to it. More categorically
than in any other milliner painting, Degas distanced himself from
showing what George Moore described as "the dim, sweet, sad poet-
ry of female work," although how fascinating he ever found this
aspect of the milliner's life is open to debate.38 Not only did Degas
obliterate the shop assistant in At the Milliner's, relegating the ubiqui-
tous mirror to a position off stage, he also hinted at the elegant
furnishings of a maison de haute couture with the greatest discretion.
For there is no doubt that the interior shown here belongs to the rue
de la Paix and not the bustling, populous world of the burgeoning
department store described in loving detail by Zola. The point is
best made by comparison with photographs of such interiors, even a
decade later, such as M. Felix's establishment on the rue Saint Hon-
ore. The sofa and banquettes of the young ladies' room chez Felix
(fig. 41) are as inviting and secluded as the diamond-patterned sofa
in the pastel. The pier glasses that repeat the majestic palms in the
fashion hall of the same establishment (fig. 42) are also to be found
in the background of At the Milliner's.59

Noting that Degas was "brought up in a fashionable set," Gauguin
commented ironically that he "dared to go into ecstacies before the
milliners' shops in the Rue de la Paix" with their "pretty artificial-
ity."40 Yet such "pretty artificiality" is secondary in this pastel to
something far more intriguing and more disturbing: women's inti-
macy, out-of-doors, as it were. Degas used a realist's vocabulary to
explore moments of privacy that are perhaps impenetrable and did
so with restraint and modesty. This is the great distance separating
his art from that of Zola's. In fact, it was the British Impressionist
Walter Sickert who seems to have best grasped Degas's enterprise in
paintings such as At the Milliner's. Writing of one of his early visits to
Degas's studio, in either 1883 or 1885, Sickert recalled Degas pro-
nouncing that painters had made too much of formal portraiture of
women, "whereas, their hundred and one gestures, their chatteries,
See, should inspire an infinite variety of design."41 This is perhaps

the most evocative assessment yet made of At the Milliner's.

1 CBB

Berthe Morisot

FRENCH, 1841-1895

The Pink Dress, c. 1870

oil on canvas, 2lv4 x 26v2 inches

The pink dress is among the two dozen or so paintings made by
Berthe Morisot before her thirtieth birthday to have survived: Mal-
larme's "amicable Medusa" is thought to have destroyed the greater
part of her early work in dissatisfaction and frustration.1 The rem-
nants of Morisot's signature, in red, at the lower right of the canvas,
suggest that this was one of the rare paintings she considered accept-
able for presentation to the sitter.

Fortunately, the circumstances in which The Pink Dress was painted
are documented to a remarkable degree through the testimony of
Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942), society portraitist, friend of
the Impressionists, and avid collector of the new painting.2 Of
Blanche's many recollections of his childhood in Passy, that elegant
section to the west of Paris that is a continuation of the sixteenth
arrondissement, his meetings with Berthe Morisot and her set are
among the most vivid. He was particularly eloquent on the attractive
circle of well-educated, upper middle-class young women who con-
gregated at the home of Jean-Baptiste and Francoise Leonarde
Carre at the Villa Fodor, a residence on rue Jean-Bologne built in
1856 by the celebrated French soprano Josephine Fodor-Mainveille,
and, according to Blanche, the setting for The Pink Dress} Passy
society, as opposed to Parisian society, was dominated by families like
the Morisots and the Carres, and is the vital context for Morisot's
early work.

Although written at the age of sixty, Blanche's recollections are full
of pertinent details concerning The Pink Dress, and these give his
somewhat Proustian efforts the quality of an eyewitness account. In
an article dedicated to Julie Manet, Eugene Manet and Morisot's only
child, he wrote: "I met Mile Berthe at the Villa Fodor many times: I
was meant to be playing games there, but it was really your mother
that I went to see, for even then, paint brushes and colors interested
me a great deal more than badminton and croquet. One day, she
painted before my eyes a charming portrait of Mile Marguerite in a
light pink dress; indeed, the entire canvas was light. Here Berthe

Morisot was fully herself, already eliminating from nature both shad-
ows and half-tones. "4

Marguerite Carre he remembered as a rather beleaguered sitter,
dressed "in the manner of Berthe Morisot," seated on the sofa
"straight as a tent peg," reminding those who watched Morisot paint
of a fashionable doll.5 The portrait was completed over several ses-
sions, since Morisot "constantly changed her mind and painted over
what she had done once the session was at an end, and Mile Mar-
guerite was obliged to pose for months at a time, without the sketch
seeming to advance any further."6

The Pink Dress has indeed retained traces of the struggle for form
and idiom to which Blanche alluded, recording, almost in spite of
itself, the artist's hesitations and changes of mind. In a bold, frontal
pose, the young Marguerite Carre sits rather uncomfortably on a
small sofa with white slip covers, her right hand nervously fingering
the fabric of her pink dress. Although not immediately apparent,
her light brown hair falls from behind her head — a domestic Olym-
pia! — and she wears a discreet black net over one side of her chignon.
On a small round table behind her are ornaments of a Japanese
flavor: a painted fan and a decorated cachepot with a large rubber
plant. Gazing directly at the spectator, Marguerite rests her left
hand on a large bolster of gold and white, her left arm foreshortened
in a pose that is daring, if not altogether successful. There is some
further disjunction in the angle of the sofa, set at a slight oblique
both to the background and the table even though Marguerite
Carre's frontal posture seems to demand a more resolutely parallel
placement.

In The Pink Dress Morisot's handling is at once aggressive and
controlled, her "fury and nonchalance" held in check by her deter-
mination to give plasticity and vigor to the mundane objects she
describes.7 Much of the composition bears the marks of scraping and
repainting, but nowhere is this as obsessive as in the background,
where practically every element has been altered or reformulated.
The clusters of bright red paint that bloom eerily from beneath the
leaves of the rubber plant indicate that she changed her mind more
than once about the sort of potted plant she wanted: rubber plant or
geranium. Between the cachepot and the Japanese fan is the spectral
outline of a perfume vial or decanter, an ornament she finally reject-
ed. It is almost impossible to guess what Morisot may have painted in
the background to the right of Mile Carre, for this area has the feel
of a battleground, so extensive is the scraping and repainting. It
seems that even after she came to the felicitous decision to leave the

background empty— thereby detracting as little attention as possible
from Marguerite— Morisot hesitated in her choice of tone. After
first painting over in black, she effaced the color and repainted in
brown; the textured penumbra that this process created serves well
to emphasize the luminosity of the sitter and her dress.

The changes made in painting Marguerite Carre herself were less
radical, but remain visible nonetheless. The sitter's hands and sleeves
presented considerable difficulty and were moved more than once.
Marguerite's right arm was initially placed closer to the edge of the
sofa, and patches of pink paint, formerly the sleeve of her dress, are
to be seen quite clearly through the grays and whites of the slip
covers. That so much of the dark background tone is visible in this
section suggests that the shape of the sofa itself was also adjusted.

Blanche's discussion of Morisot's painting at the Villa Fodor men-
tions the changes that are found in The Pink Dress almost point for
point, and it is this concordance that lends such weight to his testimo-
ny. Blanche remembered Marguerite and her elder sister Valentine
as among Morisot's earliest models, "with their full heads of light hair
in lace netting" and in dresses "with the waistline just below the
breast and with a fluted frill open in the shape of a heart." Over their
collars thev attached a "band of velvet that trailed down the back,"
and the effect was captivating: "Theirs was a look that said, 'Follow
me, young man' and was one very much in keeping with the style of
the Villa Fodor."8

Blanche could almost be describing Marguerite Carre as she is
portrayed in The Pink Dress, and his discussion of the use Morisot
made of accessories in her portraits is equally compelling. The artist
favored "cachepots made of Gien earthenware, in which were placed
rubber plants with large leaves"; she liked "comfortable squat arm-
chairs and white slip covers, which she almost always used to hide the
ugly rosewood furniture" — features that are much in evidence in this
portrait.9

But it is his recollection of Morisot at work on The Pink Dress that
has unexpected documentary value. The artist was surrounded by
the indulgent and amused matrons of Passy, her own mother includ-
ed, who teased her outrageously as the painting took on form:
"Wherever did you get such ideas? To put a lilac piano in a portrait,
to include muslin curtains, and to paint a rubber plant instead of a
bouquet of flowers!"10

The exclamations of Morisot's audience are precious: We know
that the artist hesitated before painting the rubber plant in its fash-
ionable holder, and that she may have been persuaded to paint
instead a more orthodox bouquet, which she then promptly elimi-
nated. The passage also offers a clue as to what else may have once

appeared in the background, for it is not altogether impossible to
imagine in the shapes behind the sofa on the right the contours of an
upright piano, or even of muslin curtains, both elements wisely re-
moved on one of the many reworkings that the composition under-
went.

Blanche was in no doubt as to the identity of the sitter in The Pink
Dress, and he had good reason to remember Marguerite Carre, since
it was she who had first introduced him at age seven to Berthe
Morisot in 1867.11 Later writers have confused the issue in mistaking
the sitter for Louise-Valentine Carre, Marguerite's elder sister, who
briefly caught Manet's attention in 1870 and posed for the seated
female figure in his first plein-air painting, In the Garden (fig. 43),
until prevented from returning by her appalled mother.12

Albertie-Marguerite Carre was born in Paris on February 16, 1854,
and was thus thirteen years Morisot's junior. On November 10, 1897, at
the age of forty-five, she married Ferdinand-Henri Himmes (1852-
1917), sous-chef in the Ministry of Finance, and previously the hus-
band of her sister, Louise-Valentine, who had died in August 1896.'3
In October dispensation for the already related couple to marry had
been requested from the French government.14 They visited Julie
Manet two weeks before their wedding, just after such permission
had been granted: "How strange life is," recorded Julie in her diary,
"For some time now everyone thought Mile Carre would remain a
spinster for the rest of her days. Her sister dies and life suddenly
begins for her; for the first time in her life she considers herself to be
somebody. It is almost as if the two sisters could not live at the same
time."15

Part of the confusion concerning the identity of the sitter stems
from the fact that both sisters shared the same husband, and thus
the same surname. The accuracy of Blanche's memory is confirmed
by the recollections of a living descendant of the Morisot household,
Julie Manet's cousin, Mine Agathe Rouart-Valery, who can remember
Marguerite Himmes's visits when she was a young girl. By then.
Marguerite's "round, well-powdered cheeks and fine features" were
all that remained to evoke Morisot's portrait of her. On one such
occasion, Mme Himmes unexpectedly encountered the master of
the household, the great symbolist poet Paul Valery, and was so
intimidated that she hardly uttered a word.16 Still living in Passy,
Marguerite Carre died childless, at the age of seventy-nine, on Jan-
uary 31, 1935, her husband having predeceased her by some eigh-
teen years on August 31, 1917. Valentine and Marguerite Carre are
buried alongside Ferdinand Himmes in the cemetery of Passy.17

Tracing Marguerite Carre's date of birth and the meager details of
her life is of great help in assigning a date to the painting itself. This

was something Blanche did not do, mentioning only that he had first
been introduced to Morisot in 1867 and that his childhood reminis-
cences were confined to the Second Empire, which came to a close in
September 1870.18 Certainly, Morisot presents us with a rather shy,
self-conscious sitter, full of face and rather uneasy under the artist's
penetrating gaze. Although elaborately dressed, Marguerite Carre
seems to be on the threshold of early womanhood, but she is clearly
still quite young.

In trying to arrive at a date for The Pink Dress, which has been
customarily dated to 1873, the influence of Morisot's mentor and
teacher, Edouard Manet, is also of the greatest significance. Most
recently the portrait has been ingeniously related to Reading (fig.
44), Manet's celebrated portrait of his wife Suzanne (see p. 10),
which clearly provided Morisot with a prototype for her own compo-
sition.19 The position of Marguerite Carre on the sofa derives from
Suzanne reclining as she listens to her son read to her, although
Morisot's sitter has little of Suzanne's composure. Curiously, Morisot
lavished as much care on Marguerite's hands, finely modeled, with
elegant, tapering fingers, as Manet had taken with those of his
pianist wife. So much indebted to Manet's Reading is this portrait
that it has been called, somewhat dismissively, "a simple exercise,"
and dated to late 1868: a time when Morisot would have had ample
opportunity to study the painting at her leisure, while posing for the
seated figure in Manet's Balcony ( Musee d'Orsay, Paris).20 Attractive
as this hypothesis is, it is open to revision on many counts. First,
Reading was not necessarily completed by the latter part of 1868. It is
a painting on which Manet may have worked over a period of eight
years, with parts of the painting executed in the early 1870s.21 In a
letter of March 1869, Berthe Morisot's mother noted with some
asperity that Manet had finally painted his wife— "I think it was high
time"— which could suggest that Reading was not completed, even in
its initial form, until early that year.22 And Morisot would have an-
other chance to gaze at this painting, either at Manet's studio on the
rue Guyot or at his family house, during her second protracted
modeling session for him, in 1870, when he painted his celebrated
portrait of her, Repose (Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of
Design, Providence), in the early summer of that year.23

A date of c. 1870 for The Pink Dress is satisfying for other reasons.
Whereas it is difficult to see Marguerite Carre as a fourteen year old
(one thinks of Degas* bronze dancer of the same age), it is just
possible to reconcile Morisot's image of burgeoning womanhood
with a girl who had reached her sixteenth year. The Pink Dress is also
very close in every aspect of its composition to the enigmatic Two

Seated Women (The Sisters) (fig. 45), which is dated between 1869 and
1875.24 This is another portrait that bears the imprint of the Villa
Fodor: the polka dot dresses, the brightly patterned sofa, the black
chokers are all elements evoked in Blanche's recollection.25

While the more aggressive handling in The Pink Dress owes some-
thing to the informal manner of another social intimate, Alfred
Stevens, the solidity of modeling, the assured and insistent applica-
tion of paint, and the rapt frontal gaze are features shared by Mori-
sot's early work the Portrait of Jeanne-Marie (fig. 46), dated to 1871.
The Pink Dress, with its lingering indebtedness to Manet, may well be
the earliest of this related group and should be dated to around 1870.

Marguerite Carre would sit for Morisot twice more. She was the
subject of a pastel portrait, now lost, that Eugene Manet had encour-
aged his wife to exhibit at the Dudley Gallery in London in October
1875.26 She appears again as the svelte and elegant young woman in
the Young Woman in a Ballgown (fig. 47), dated to 1873, which Julie
Manet admired at the first Morisot retrospective at Durand-Ruel's
gallery in March 1896. 27

If previous discussion of The Pink Dress has suffered from a case of
mistaken identity, there has been similar confusion over the prove-
nance of this painting. Contrary to what has been repeated until very
recently, Morisot's portrait of Mile Carre did not appear in the Sixth
Impressionist Exhibition of 1881.28 Although the artist's submissions
there included a Young Woman in Pink, the single detailed discussion
of this painting, Nina de Villar's review in he Courrier du Soir, disqual-
ifies it as The Pink Dress. Apart from the improbability of Morisot
exhibiting a work some ten years old at such a progressive salon, the
review praised Morisot's portrait of a "woman whose eyes are as blue
as the earrings that adorn her charming ears."29 Not only are Mar-
guerite's eyes blue gray, but she does not wear earrings. Similarly, it is
impossible to confirm that The Pink Dress is the same work as the
Portrait of Mme H. that appeared in two important early retrospec-
tives of Morisot's work: Durand-Ruel's exhibition of 1902, and Bern-
heim-Jeune's of 1919. The charming Portrait of Mme Hubbard, 1874
(The Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen) and the earlier, more
severe Portrait of Mme Heude, c. 1870 (private collection) are equal
contenders with Mme Himmes for these honors.30 After leaving
Mme Himmes's possession, The Pink Dress is firmly documented only
in the prestigious collection of the Argentine Antonio Santamarina,
in 1933. Santamarina had formed his impressive collection of Im-
pressionist paintings between 1895 and 1930, and it thus seems that
Marguerite Carre-Himmes would have parted with Morisot's por-
trait before she died in 1935.

CBB

Henri Fantin-Latour

FRENCH, 1836-1904

Asters and Fruit on a Table, 1868
oil on canvas, 22$k x 215/8 inches

O F THE GREAT painters who emerged in Paris in the 1860s, Fan-
tin-Latour is perhaps the most difficult to place in a precise pattern
of historical development. While he is closely linked to the most
restless and progressive artists of his generation, influences on his
style are difficult to isolate. The most distinctive elements of his
deeply personal paintings derive from an assimilation of the old
masters he so devotedly copied in the Louvre (sometimes in the
company of Manet) and a sharp observation of nature, the "truth" to
which he so often referred. Just as he would refuse to join the group
of his friends (later tagged Impressionists) in their first independent
exhibition in 1874, he would always be a figure somewhat outside
any movement, watching and recording, but finally working in a
manner that only directly compares to what came before in his own
creations. As he noted to his close English friend and patron Edwin
Edwards in 1866: "I even believe that the time of schools and artistic
movements is past. After the Romantic movement, born of classiciz-
ing exaggeration, after the Realist movement, product of the follies
of Romanticism, it may be seen that there is a great foolishness in all
these ideas. We are going to achieve a personal manner of feeling."1

One thing that set him aside was his devotion to still-life and
flower painting, a genre practiced with notable achievement by
Manet, Renoir, and Monet (particularly in the late 1860s) but never
central to the work of the Impressionists. In this, Fantin-Latour
initially reflected the established artistic atid commercial taste of his
period. The revival of still-life painting during the second decade of
the Second Empire was so strong that the critic J. A. Castagnary
could comment in his review of the 1863 Salon that it threatened to
undermine the "higher" foundations of that institution, based as it
was (at least in principle) on a stern, hierarchic ordering of subjects
that placed still lifes at the very bottom.2

Pictures that celebrated the accrual of luxurious possessions, such
as those by Blaise-Alexandre Desgoffe (1830-1901), found a ready
market among bourgeois collectors. The more subdued products of
a revived interest in Chardin by Francois Bonvin (1817-1887), An-
toine Vollon (1833-1900), and Philippe Rousseau (1816-1887) revi-
talized the form. Yet it was Fantin-Latour who made still life, particu-
larly the juxtaposition of flowers with other objects, completely his
own for the next forty years. In 1863 Zacharie Astruc, the champion
of Corot, Delacroix, and Manet, compared Fantin-Latour's flower
pieces to his portraits: "In order to reveal this painter's talent in all
its freshness, charm, and strength, one must — after a thorough con-
sideration of his large pictures, ...which are of the first rank — turn to
his flower paintings, so highly regarded in the art world. These are
all marvels of colour and artistic sensibility. They are as compelling
as they are charming, in fact one might even call them moving. They
are tonal rhythms, freshness, abandon, surprising vivacity. Their

beauty captivates. This is nature with all... that fleeting radiance

that is the fate of flowers Delicacy of expression being the essence

of his art, Fantin seems to be the visual poet of flowers."3

Such astute criticism could apply directly to Asters and Fruit on a
Table, painted five years later, showing a seemingly uncalculated
array of autumn fruit and flowers on a mahogany table. Purple and
white China asters (Callistephus chinensis) are loosely placed in a
fluted glass vase; green and pale purple grapes partially fall from a
footed plate; and a small bunch of dark grapes sits perilously near the
edge of the drop-leaf table, this backed by a grouping of pears and
apples. Although the objects appear palpable and literal, Fantin-La-
tour's professed lack of interest in the specific nature of what he
depicted is evident, since they partake of a spatial and coloristic
drama quite removed from the sensuous evocations of a Chardin still
life or the moralistic overtones of seventeenth-century Dutch still
lifes, to which the work of Fantin-Latour is often compared. Fantin-
Latour has removed his subjects from mundane consideration and
placed them within the "personal manner of feeling," which he de-
scribed to Edwards. His frustration with complaints that his still lifes
were of a monotonous sameness can nowhere better be addressed
than here, since for all the formulaic directness of the composition,
the individuality in the color and execution of this picture sets it
aside from any other. The spatial conventions of his own invention —
the circular element in the middle ground at left, the vertical silhou-
ette establishing a depth of field beyond in the center, the looser
movement into objects on the right, and the nearly standardized
oblique angle of the table— are executed in a manner of tightly keyed
touch and color that sets them off from any other still life of similar
composition. The paint is applied over the surface in a lean, dry
manner; the pervasive effect established by the dashed-on back-
ground (reminiscent of an unfinished background in a Jacques-
Louis David) is calculated in the spaces of the hatching to support
the dry but denser depiction of the petals of the asters, the translu-
cent vase, and the ambiguously resonant polished mahogany. In
turn, the pale grapes have just the right balance of substantiality and
transparency, as does the solid white of the plate in contrast to its
more thinly worked shadowed foot. The plav of thin and thick tex-
ture reaches its fullest declaration in the fruit on the right, where
only one object, the red apple, is shown in full density; the others,
more molded and recessive, are presented in a lower voice. With the
exception of the red of the apple, the colors are secondary and
rather acerbic, greens and yellows against brown, purple and red
against gray.

In the late 1860s, as he noted, Fantin-Latour developed an ability
to manage complexity within his pictures in a more subtle and evoca-
tive manner. Each work of this period, particularly those as composi-
tionally complicated as this one, seems cast in a very specific key that
is harmonized in the most discreet and personal way. Elements of his
pochades (quick studies) are retained, and give a spontaneity and
freshness to what could easily become dense and ponderous, allow-
ing a nervous intelligence to survive within the picture. Sometimes,
as here, his works in a minor key are the most revealing. It is this
revelation of Fantin-Latour's moody and profound temperament,
that, one suspects, was best appreciated by Degas, who of his con-
temporaries best understood and appreciated Fantin-Latour.

JJR

Henri Fantin-Latour

FRENCH, 1836-1904

Roses in a Bowl, 1883

OIL ON CANVAS, llS^ X 16^8 INCHES

One side of Fantin's art— his exquisite Flower Painting— we, in
England, were the first to appreciate," wrote the critic and art histo-
rian Frederick Wedmore in 1906. This he attributed not merely to a
favorable press, but to the energies of "the interesting etcher" Edwin
Edwards (1823-1879) and his wife, Elizabeth Ruth (fig. 48), "alert,
enthusiastic, as well as influential," who, for long years, were "of
infinite service to [Fantin's] name."' First introduced to the Ed-
wardses in February or March of 1861 by Whistler's friend the
English painter Matthew White Ridley (1836-1888), Fantin-Latour
tapped the English market during the 1860s both with Whistler's
assistance and in informal arrangement with Edwards. Not until
June 1872 did Edwards become Fantin's official agent in England.
Thereafter, despite disagreements with him over prices and strata-
gem, the artist remained loyal to Edwards, and, after 1879, to his
widow, until he finally severed all connection with the English mar-
ket in January i8gg.2 Yet for almost thirty years, Fantin had provided
the Edwardses with a steady supply of flower paintings, which they
placed in collections and exhibitions throughout the country; his
choice of flowers and accessories was, in large part, dictated by
them.5

Hence the prodigious number of roses in Fantin's oeuvre, a flower
beloved of the Victorian public and in the painting of which, as a
contemporary, Jacques-Emile Blanche, wrote, the artist had "no
equal."4 Roses in a Bowl, most likely painted in the summer of 1883 at
his wife's country home at Bure in Normandy, was precisely the sort
of cabinet picture that appealed to this public. On a dark ledge that
merges imperceptibly into the wall behind is placed a group of tea

roses, set into a two-handled, footed vase — of a type that Fantin
presumably favored because they "count for nothing, and don't dis-
tract the attention to be paid to the flowers."5 The receptacle may
have been provided by the Edwardses themselves in accordance with
English taste, but was used again by Fantin in the much grander
Roses and Larkspur of 1885 (Glasgow University), where similar roses
appear, similarly arranged, as well as in the following painting, Roses
and Lilies.

Although varnish obscures some of the delicate handling here, the
artist has achieved a rich, almost dramatic resonance as the deeply
colored flowers emerge from the penumbra to cast their glow into
the surrounding shadows. With the artist's customary restraint, two
leaves trail from the white rose on the right and touch the ledge; the
vase and flowers leave long shadows, painted brown against brown,
which give interest to the mottled background in this undifferentiat-
ed setting.

Simple and restrained, Roses in a Bowl nonetheless looks back to
two weighty artistic traditions. Recalling his own early work of the
1860s, Degas noted, "In our beginnings, Fantin, Whistler and I
were all on the same road, the road from Holland."6 Unlike Whistler
and Degas, Fantin never strayed too far from the Dutch seventeenth
century in his respect for the minor genre of flower painting.
Blanche wrote eloquently on Fantin's flower painting, calling him "a
grandchild of Chardin's"— and, indeed, the effortless transformation
of the foreground ledge into the background wall is a device that
Fantin borrowed directly from the eighteenth-century master of still
life.7 Although the rediscovery of Chardin in the middle of the
nineteenth century was of considerable importance for realist still-
life painters such as Francois Bonvin (1817-1887) and Philippe Rous-
seau (1816-1887), Fantin was less directly influenced by him.8 Yet if
Chardin painted flowers rarely, one of his most accomplished follow-
ers, Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818), made them her speciality,
and in their simple elegance and easy charm (fig. 49) they are the
true eighteenth-century ancestors of Fantin's peculiarly English

Henri Fantin-Latour

FRENCH, 1836-1904

Roses and Lilies, 1888

oil on canvas, 2$/* x 18 inches

In July 1888 Fantin-Latour informed his old friend the Frankfurt
painter Otto Scholderer (1834-1902) that he was already "very
tired" painting flowers even though the summer was still young.1
Writing from his wife's family home in Bure, Normandy, where he
had spent every summer from 1880 and where he painted most of
his flower pieces, he expressed something of the boredom that many
commentators have found in his paintings of this decade.2 The artist,
after all, had been producing relatively small flower paintings almost
exclusively for the English market since 1861. And the overwhelming
and insistent manner of his dealer, Ruth Edwards, the widow and
partner of Edwin Edwards (1823-1879), who had "discovered" Fan-
tin-Latour, may certainly have contributed to his disenchantment
with the genre by this time.3 Yet Roses and Lilies, dated 1888 and
therefore probably painted at Bure in the summer of that year, bears
no sign of such weariness, nor does it show the slightest falling off in
artistic power. Thus it serves to question the charge of atrophy that is
routinely applied to Fantin-Latour's work of this period.

Against a subtle lavender-gray and warm brown background, four
stems of lilies, set in a plain glass vase filled almost to the brim with
water, cast their gentle shadows. A bowl of roses, cut at full bloom, is
placed to the left. Each lily is observed in great detail, from the vivid
orange stamen to the creamy whites of the curving petals, dusted
with mauve and yellow. What Ruskin had called "the finely drawn
leafage of the discriminated flower"4 could apply equally well to the
roses— rich, full flowers, with the ridges of their petals carefully
described— whose whites are set off by the most delicate strokes of
blue. Unexpected highlights of blue also model the underside of the
bowl that holds the roses, and create, in hatching lines, the outer
edges of the vertical glass vase and the surface of the water inside.

Although we do not know the circumstances in which Roses and
Lilies was painted, a detailed account of the artist at work the follow-
ing summer serves to illuminate his technique and working method.5
He used commercially prepared canvases known as toile absorbante,
with a gessolike ground layer, whose luminosity was maintained
through subsequent layers of paint. In Roses and Lilies he applied an
imprimatura layer, here a thin, even glaze of brown, over the off-
white ground, making the weave texture very apparent: this now
formed the base color upon which his flowers would be painted. The
imprimatura layer was itself enlivened by a thin stippled layer of
lavender gray, handled in such a way as to produce a scumbled effect
suggesting the randomness of the reflections cast by the blooms.6

In the account of the artist at work in 1889, Fantin-Latour waited
until the day after he had prepared his canvas before picking the

flowers he wanted to paint from his garden and choosing the appro-
priate vessels for them from among the vases supplied by Mrs. Ed-
wards. He also placed the flowers against a piece of cardboard
painted the same color as the background of his canvas, a procedure
he may well have followed in executing Roses and Lilies.7 Only after
all this would he concentrate on painting the flowers themselves,
which he did quickly and confidently, using relatively small strokes of
impasto. A particularly attractive feature of Roses and Lilies is Fantin-
Latour's use of the tip of the handle of his paintbrush, or a similar
instrument, to incise and manipulate the wet paint. This device is
employed effectively to suggest the edges of the petals of the central
rose and the ribs of the lilies above. Delicate incisions, which allow
the background tone to push through the whites, can be discerned
on almost every lily: Fantin-Latour's line cuts cleanly through the
thinly impasted surface and is sufficiently varied and discrete to
avoid degenerating into a technical cliche. He followed a similar
procedure in painting the tabletop and glass vase, where the original
layer of blue paint has been almost completely removed by the scrap-
ing action of the brush handle, leaving the most delicate of scribbles
to define the curved surfaces of the vase and the reflections within.

Such virtuosity, as well as the easy elegance of his compositions and
their spare, unusual harmonies, distinguished Fantin-Latour's work
from the genre painting of his English contemporaries, which the
French critic Ernest Chesneau characterized as "one of microscopic
analysis driven to the utmost extreme" and which provides the
proper context for an appraisal of Fantin-Latour's flower painting.8
It should always be remembered that Fantin-Latour's still lifes were
made for a Victorian public — despite Durand-Ruel's numerous pur-
chases in 1872 this aspect of his oeuvre found little favor in France9—
and that from his earliest visit to London he had been intrigued by
the Pre-Raphaelites.

By the late 1870s the lily had become vulgarized as Oscar Wilde's
flower, and the pre-eminent symbol of the Aesthetic movement in
England— a resonance strongly felt in the striking White Lilies (fig.
50), painted in 1877, and still perceptible in the more subdued Roses
and Lilies. Furthermore, although his friendship with Whistler was
long at an end by the 1880s, Fantin-Latour aspired in Roses and Lilies
to the lofty realm that Whistler claimed for the artist in his celebrat-
ed "Ten O'Clock Lecture," delivered in London in February 1885.
Whistler, another proponent of Art-for-Art's Sake, argued that the
artist is privy to the mysteries of nature in recording her creations:
"He looks at her flower, not with the enlarging lens, that he may
gather facts for the botanist, but with the light of the one who sees in
her choice selection of brilliant tones and delicate tints, suggestions
of future harmonies."10 For Fantin-Latour, as for Whistler, nature is
always "dainty and lovable": and it was through his determined rejec-
tion of a slavish and prosaic verism that he was able to aspire to the
poetry of "hushed silence" that Paul Claudel discovered in his best
flower paintings.11

CBB

PlERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

FRENCH, 1841-1919

Niniin the Garden, 1875-76
oil on canvas, 24v8 x 20 inches

.A.CCORDING to Ambroise Vollard's memoirs, in the spring of

1875 Renoir rented a second Parisian studio and garden, at 12 rue
Cortot, after he had sold his Mother and Children (The Frick Collec-
tion, New York) for the princely sum of 1,200 francs.1 For the next
eighteen months he divided his time between his home at 35 rue
Saint-Georges and the upper story of this dilapidated seventeenth-
century outbuilding on the Butte Montmartre, where he also had use
of the stables to store his canvases and, even more important, free
run of a large garden in which to paint in plein air. Having estab-
lished residence in Montmartre, Renoir began work the following
year on the masterpiece of his Impressionist period, the Moulin de la
Galette (Musee d'Orsay, Paris), conceived between April and October

1876 in both the open-air dance hall and the garden of the rue
Cortot.

As Renoir's son pointed out, his father rarely worked on one
canvas at a time, and Nini in the Garden, signed but not dated,
belongs to the period immediately before work on the Moulin de la
Galette began in earnest.2 Inspired by Monet's work at Argenteuil,
Renoir had been experimenting since the early 1870s with the motif
of young women in the garden: in size, format, and orientation, Nini
in the Garden may be loosely grouped with Woman with a Black
Dog, 1874 (formerly, Charles Clore Collection, London) and the
radiant Umbrella of 1878 (sale, Christie's, May 11, 1988, lot 15). These
paintings are identical in size (24 by 20 inches); each explores the
problem of integrating the clothed female figure in ambient davlight
and achieving a harmony between elegant Parisienne and exuberant
nature.3 Even more closely related is Young Girl on the Beach (fig. 51),
which was probablv painted at the same session: there, the model,
Nini Lopez, sits on a similar garden chair wearing identical dress,
but her presence is more assertive, now the chief element in the
composition.4 Both paintings convey the delight that Renoir experi-
enced in the large garden at the rue Cortot. Georges Riviere, who
had accompanied Renoir in his search for the ideal Montmartre
studio, recalled that "as soon as Renoir entered the house, he was
charmed by the view of this garden, which looked like a beautiful
abandoned park. Once we had passed through the narrow hallway,
we stood before a vast uncultivated lawn dotted with poppies, convol-
vulus, and daisies."5 Beyond this, Riviere continued, lay a beautiful
alle'e planted with trees stretching the full length of the garden— this
was the view that Renoir used for his celebrated painting The Swing
(Musee d'Orsay, Paris)— and at the end was a fruit and vegetable
patch with dense bushes and poplar trees. It is difficult to know
exactly which corner of the garden is represented in this painting,
all hough Nini does appear to be sitting at the edge of an untidy lawn.

Renoir's model here, Nini Lopez, a young girl from Montmartre,
appeared in at least fourteen of the artist's canvases between 1874
and 1878, and it has recently been suggested that she posed for the
large Mother and Children.6 Riviere described her as an "ideal model:
punctual, serious and discreet" and admired her "marvelous head of
shining, golden blond hair."7 Renoir would also remember her as
beautiful and docile, but somewhat duplicitous— he spoke of "a cer-

tain Belgian disingenuousness" in her.8 Although Nini's mother en-
tertained hopes that Renoir would eventually become her protector,
these were finally disappointed when Nini married a third-rate actor
from the Montmartre theatre.

In Nini in the Garden, which should be dated around 1875-76,
Renoir's handling is energized, nervous, and experimental. He
makes no attempt to unify the paint surface of his canvas: ridges of
rich impasto sit alongside areas of barely covered ground. His color
is nonetheless applied in dabs and strokes of varying touch, appro-
priate to the forms they describe. Thus, the leafy bushes in the
background are a mosaic of greens, browns, and ochers; the sky in
the upper left a series of blue strokes placed over the greens — the
most obvious of Renoir's borrowings from Monet. Nini herself is
painted more emphatically, the violet blue of her hat and underskirt
the densest blocks of color in the composition. Nini's costume is very
similar to, if not identical to, the one she wears in Departure from the
Conservatory (fig. 52). Comparison helps establish the design of
Nini's ensemble as it appears in Nini in the Garden: dark tunic over a
light pinafore dress, with dark underskirt, this last element just visi-
ble through the grass and plants.

It is clear, however, that costume is of little concern to Renoir here.
His chief interest is to record the sunlight as it filters through bushes
and trees onto the diminutive and fashionably dressed Parisienne. He
had already investigated these effects on the nude; Nini in the Garden
marks an early stage in such treatment of the dressed figure. Some-
what tentatively, Renoir painted the reflections of foliage on Nini's
face and the larger shadows on her dress. Her golden brown tresses
are overwhelmed by the greens and browns of the background
foliage; the forms of her dress dissolve in the dappled light and
shadow.

Those elements of Renoir's luminist vocabulary that would cause
such outrage in 1877 — his colored shadows, the violet tonality of his
outdoor scenes — are present in this early example: for example, the
line of chartreuse that defines Nini's cheek and chin as well as the
mauve patches of shadow on her dress. Although his plein-air paint-
ing still owed much to Monet — whose Camille Reading, 1872 (fig. 53),
had explored the dappled effect of sunlight on the dressed figure-
in the paintings he made in the garden of the rue Cortot, Renoir
developed what Theodore Duret would consider his most striking
contribution to Impressionism: depicting the human figure in the
endlessly changing, mobile light of nature.9 Renoir's exploration of
light dancing over the human figure would achieve full expression in
The Swing and Moulin de la Galette. In Nini in the Garden such effects
are rendered a little hesitantly, but with the daring of experiment.

It is not only in matters of technique that Nini in the Garden is
characteristic. Nini, in elegant tocque and fashionable dress,
sits somewhat uncomfortably on the makeshift garden chair, her
neat and relatively formal attire contrasting wittily with the over-
grown and unkempt garden. She is transformed from professional
model and working-class beauty into demure lady of the manor.
And this transformation is made, typically, with both sympathy and
tenderness and a complete lack of condescension. Julie Manet would
recall Renoir saying how delicate he had found the people of Mont-
martre whom Zola had portrayed as bestial.10 Yet his depiction of
Nini is equally misleading, replacing the customs of Montmartre
with a sweeter respectability This was Renoir's great fiction— as
willful as Zola's— and it was at the core of his figure paintings of the
1870s, sustaining a vision of modernity that was highly colored and
eternally joyous.

PlERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

FRENCH, 1841-1919

EUGkNE MURER, 1877

OIL ON CANVAS, 18V16 X ltf/s INCHES

Toward the end of 1877 Renoir painted the portrait of Hya-
cinthe-Eugene Meunier, known as Eugene Murer (1846-1906)— cele-
brated pastry cook and restaurateur, published novelist and poet,
and avid collector of the works of Pissarro, Guillaumin, Sisley, and
Renoir.1 This small canvas— a number 8— followed a format that Ren-
oir had begun to use for the informal portraiture of his sponsors. It
may be compared to his earlier paintings of Victor Chocquet and to
his portrait of the Republican official Jacques-Eugene Spuller (fig.
54), which has been convincingly redated to 1877 and is very similar
to the Murer portrait in handling and arrangement.2 Renoir's ravish-
ing portrait of Murer's son, Paul Meunier (fig. 55), painted between
1877 and 1879, is of similar dimensions.3

In the portrait of Eugene Murer, Renoir's loose and brushy han-
dling adapts itself almost effortlessly to the constraints imposed both
by genre— the public nature of commissioned portraiture, however
informal— and by size. It is clear from the slight change in the place-
ment of Murer's left hand and a certain indecision as to where the
edge of his sleeve and the line of his shirt cuff should meet that
Renoir experienced some difficulty in arriving at the appropriate
pose for his model. Once solved, the formula was repeated in his
portrait of Murer's half-sister, Marie (fig. 56).

Murer's elegant frock coat and gilet are painted freely, the white
ground showing through the thin layers of blue-black paint. His
blue-black foulard and pink pocket handkerchief— accessories of a
dandy— are indicated by the most summary of strokes. Yet, at the
same time, Renoir painted the two fine lines of blue silk to which
Murer's spectacles are attached: these fall from the buttons of his
waistcoat and disappear behind the wide lapel, an astonishing detail
and one wholly unexpected in this bravura passage.

It is in the painting of Murer's face, however, that Renoir's han-
dling is at its most exquisitely controlled. Murer's beard is a panoply
of color, delicate touches of olive green, mauve gray, and orange that
merge imperceptibly and whose richness is deliberately muted. The
flesh tones of Murer's face are enlivened by a filigree of colored
strokes— note especially the blues on the temples, under his eyes,
around his nose— striations that give rhythm and mobility to Murer's
intense gaze, but draw no attention to themselves.

In fact, the virtuosity and variety in Renoir's handling are second-
ary to his chief purpose: the creation of character and the explora-
tion of intimacy. "Not only does he capture the features of his sitters,"
wrote Theodore Duret in Les Peintres Impressionnistes, published a
year after the portrait of Eugene Murer was painted, "but it is
through these traits that he grasps both their character and their
private selves."4 In this portrait, Murer appears as a sensitive, almost
melancholy, sitter, frail and wistful, his slight frame overwhelmed by
a costume that seems a little too large for him. Such vulnerability and
introspection were by no means the characteristics most readily
associated with Murer; the degree of idealization in Renoir's portrait
of Murer becomes apparent in surveying the biography of this inter-
esting figure.

Murer was born in Moulins, in central France, on May 20, 1846.
Reared by his grandmother and much afflicted by the neglect of his
parents, he came to Paris in the early 1860s. After a brief passage in
an architect's office, he was apprenticed as a pastry cook with Eugene
Gru, a socialist and little-known author who would remain in Murer's
circle during the 1870s. Around 1866 Murer opened his own pastry
shop and restaurant at 95 boulevard Voltaire in the eleventh arron-
dissement. He married; a child, Paul Meunier, was born in 1869.
Nothing is known of his wife, who died shortly after childbirth.
During the following decade, he was assisted at 95 boulevard Vol-
taire by his half-sister, the earlier-mentioned Marie, whose portrait
would also be painted by Pissarro.5

Murer's business flourished sufficiently during the 1870s for him
to devote more and more time to writing: in 1876 he published a
novel, Fre'mes; in 1877, a collection of stories and poems called Les
Fils du siecle.6 Much taken with Auvers-sur-Oise, where he had gone
as a guest of Dr. Paul Gachet to recover from illness, Murer built a
house there — the appropriately named Castel du Four— into which
he and his sister moved in 1881. Having sold his restaurant in Paris,
Murer then acquired the Hotel du Dauphin et d'Espagne in the
center of Rouen, and together with his sister continued as a hotelier
until her marriage in February 1897 to the playwright and theater
director Jerome Doucet. Murer exhibited his collection of Impres-
sionist paintings at the Hotel du Dauphin et d'Espagne in May 1896;
the paintings were, in fact, sold later that year to provide his sister
Marie with her marriage portion. Murer would also be obliged to
liquidate the hotel in Rouen. He spent the last decade of his life as a
painter and pastelist— prolific but utterly mediocre, dividing his time
between Auvers and his studio at 39 rue Victor-Masse in Mont-
martre.7

It was during the second half of the 1870s that Murer's interest in
the Impressionists flourished. Reunited in 1872 with his school
friend Armand Guillaumin, Murer began to hold regular Wednes-

day evening dinner parties at 95 boulevard Voltaire to which writ-
ers, musicians, and artists were invited. Zola, Cezanne, Pissarro,
Sisley, Renoir, and Gachet attended, as did Alphonse Legrand,
former employee of Durand-Ruel, who had recently begun dealing
in works of the Impressionists independently and who would estab-
lish a gallery on the rue Laf itte in 1877.8 Legrand may well have been
responsible for encouraging Murer's interest in Impressionism and
bringing him into contact with Renoir, who was soon requesting an
advance from him against paintings on deposit with Legrand.9

The heyday of Murer's collecting spans a brief but intense three
years. Between 1877 and 1879 his collection of Impressionist paint-
ing grew rapidly, and he noted to Monet in the spring of 1880 that
"with the hundred paintings I own, I'm beginning to feel quite well
off in Impressionists."10 Renoir and Pissarro decorated his apart-
ment and were commissioned to paint a series of family portraits
(fig. 57).11 Murer wrote articles reviewing the early Impressionist
exhibitions;12 he loaned five works from his collection to the Fourth
Exhibition of 1879;13 ar,d submitted a proposal for a rejuvenated
salon to the Chronique des Tribunaux of May 1880.14 By this time his
own collection had achieved a certain fame. As early as 1878 his
name had appeared alongside those of Georges de Bellio and Choc-
quet as an important collector of Impressionism.15 He was mentioned
at length in an April 1880 article in Le Coq Gaulois, where the author
was astonished that a pastry cook could have an apartment filled
with Impressionist paintings.16 In 1878 Pissarro asked Murer's per-
mission to bring the Italian art critic Diego Martelli to visit the
collection.17 Although no catalogue of his collection was ever pub-
lished, a relatively full listing by Paul Alexis, a friend of Cezanne's
and Zola's, appeared in the radical newspaper Le Cri du Peuple, in
October 1887. Murer's collection at this point numbered some 122
works, including 27 paintings by Sisley, 24 by Pissarro, 21 by Guillau-
min, 14 by Renoir, 9 by Monet, and 8 by Cezanne.18

Murer's sponsorship of the emerging Impressionists consisted
largely in advancing money to Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, and Monet-
all of whom were chronically impoverished in these years— in return
for a specified number of canvases, either painted or to be painted.
He seems to have felt at liberty to take paintings of whatever dimen-

sions pleased him, and was relentless in ensuring that these artists
fulfilled their obligations, which he often tried to make contractual.19
He paid little for these works: normally between 50 and 100 francs,
and, on exception, 150 francs — prices not outrageously low for the
time— although Pissarro was desperate enough to sell his paintings
for as little as 20 francs.20 Murer took it upon himself to offer artists'
work to other clients, often without consulting them as to price, and
was not always scrupulous in returning works he had taken on con-
signment. As late as January 1897, Pissarro wrote reminding Murer
that he still owed him a painting he had shown fifteen years before to
the collector Laurent Richard and then kept for himself "without
any right and against all justice." Since Murer's collection had been
sold just months before, it is unlikely that Pissarro ever received
satisfaction on this point.21

The case against Murer, eloquently put by Georges Riviere in
Renoir et ses amis, rests upon this sort of malpractice. Not only was he
a voracious collector, the argument runs, but he was also an exploit-
ative one, arriving at artists' studios when the rent was due, buying
paintings by the armful for derisory sums in order to sell them years
later at enormous profit.22 This both credits Murer with a farsighted-
ness that was beyond him and underestimates his commitment to the
new painting at a time when such support was rare. Neither as
generous as Gustave Caillebotte nor as discriminating as Chocquet,
Murer was an impassioned if not altogether sympathetic partisan of
Impressionism, who believed that "to buy his paintings is the great-
est compliment that can be paid to an artist."23

If Monet found Murer's determination to extract canvases repug-
nant—Monet's letters of September and November 1878 are the most
indignant he ever wrote to a collector24 — Pissarro and Renoir main-
tained good relations with him long after he had stopped collecting.
Although never entirely trusting him, both artists and their families
visited Murer in Auvers and Rouen, Renoir buying artist's materials
for him in Paris and even finding a couple to replace Murer and his
sister at the Hotel du Dauphin et d'Espagne during a particularly
busy summer season.25

Through Pissarro, Murer came into contact with Gauguin— who
lived in Rouen between November 1883 and November 1884— and

tried, unsuccessfully, to promote his work. Gauguin had shown at
least one painting at Murer's hotel, but was skeptical of his promises
to sell it.26 Nonetheless, "Le Malin Murer," as Gauguin called him, is
found writing to Gachet in June 1890, asking him to rent rooms to
Mme Gauguin and her children for three months.27

Through Gachet, Murer met Van Gogh, whom he considered the
greatest colorist of the century after Renoir.28 Murer owned two of
his paintings, notably Fritillaries in a Copper Vase, 1887 (Musee
d'Orsay, Paris). Coming across him as he was painting, Van Gogh
commented, "You are thin, and your painting is too thin. It needs
fattening up." Murer was sufficiently struck by this to record the
conversation in his diary.29 He also recorded Van Gogh's suicide and
last hours in a poignant journal entry that seems to have escaped the
notice of most scholars.

But it was Renoir— in Murer's words, "the greatest artist of our
century"— whom Murer esteemed above all others and whose paint-
ings formed the core of his collection. Murer owned splendid exam-
ples of Renoir's paintings of the 1870s, including The Harem, 1872
(National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo), the portrait of Alfred
Sisley, 1874 (The Art Institute of Chicago), The Painter's Studio, rue
Saint-Georges, 1876 (Norton Simon Foundation, Los Angeles), and
The Arbor. 1876 (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow).30
Neither Pissarro nor Sisley, whose work Murer collected in even
greater number, was represented by such consistently choice
paintings.

Murer undeniably bought his Renoirs cheaply— Pissarro was
amazed that Renoir had agreed to paint the family portraits for 100
francs each — but in 1877 Murer's financial support was crucial to
the painter.31 In October of that year, Renoir, in desperation, had
solicited Leon Gambetta for the curatorship of a provincial museum,
a request that would have drastically altered the development of his
art had it been granted.32

The portrait of Eugene Murer expresses Renoir's affection and
gratitude in a way that his aloof letters to this rather demanding
Amphitryon never could. As homage to a friend and patron, the
painting may also have inspired Van Gogh, whose celebrated portrait
of Dr. Gachet (fig. 58), painted in June 1890, reversed the pose that
Renoir had chosen for Murer. Van Gogh had arrived in Auvers-sur-
Oise in May 1890 and may well have seen Murer's collection. Ren-
oir's portrait was certainly known to Gachet, who had been a close
friend of Murer's since the early 1870s.

The portrait of Eugene Murer remained in Murer's possession
after his other paintings by Renoir were acquired by the Parisian
dentist George Viau in 1897. Following Murer's death on April 22,
1906, the portrait passed to his son, Paul, by then a garage owner in
Beaulieu, in the south of France.33 Paul Gachet noted with scorn that
dealers were hesitant to pay the modest sum of 6,000 francs for the
painting, and that it was eventually sold in 1907 for 2,500 francs.34

GBB

Pi er re- August e Renoir

FRENCH, 1841-1919

Bouquet of Chrysanthemums, 1881
oil on canvas, 26 x 217/s inches

Ihe abundance of flower painting in Renoir's oeuvre is yet to be
fully documented, but it is a genre that occupied him at every stage
in his career and one that, until the late 1880s, allowed him to
experiment with different color harmonies more easily than did
figure painting. "When I paint flowers, I feel free to try out tones
and values and worry less about destroying the canvas," Georges
Riviere remembered him saying; "I would not do this with a figure
painting, since there I would care about ruining the work."1 The
suggestion that Renoir's flower paintings were a vehicle for more
daring tonal juxtapositions was developed by Julius Meier-Graefe,
who perceived an almost abstract quality in them. Unlike Manet's
flowers, he argued, which encourage us to smell, touch, and savor
the flower with our eyes, Renoir's flowers are above all fictions of
color, possessing an independent "immaterial completeness" that
would be diminished by any comparison with the botanical species
they represent.2

Flower paintings were also easier to sell. Although Riviere claimed
that Renoir disposed of his flower paintings for little more than the
flowers cost him, both Renoir and Monet turned to still life in the
bleak period around 1880 as the most marketable of genres. It is no
coincidence that Renoir used an established format for his still lifes:
nearly all of his flower paintings of the 1870s and 1880s generally
conform to the canvas size of 25 by 21 inches.3 It is also telling that
one of Renoir's first canvases to find an American buyer was the
splendid Geraniums and Cats (private collection, New York), painted
in 1881 and exhibited by Durand-Ruel at the National Academy of
Design, New York, in April 1886. 4

Bouquet of Chrysanthemums is of the standard format for Renoir's
flower paintings. Painted on a coarse-textured canvas, it was execut-
ed rapidly, the thin washes of color first laid in to describe the diffuse
mass of flowers without concern for their individual features. With
the composition blocked out in this way, Renoir then brought each
bloom into focus by applying delicately impasted strokes of color to
define individual petals and stamens and thus give the bouquet its
structure. He also took care to record the autumnal character of
these flowers, which bloom for about six weeks, by showing the
darkening edges of the red flowers with their drying, brittle sta-
mens. Yet the chief effect is one of great luminosity and warmth.
This he achieved by setting these highly colored flowers on an or-
ange and blue background, against which they resonate, and by
generously applying touches of white lead and chrome yellow, which
vibrate on almost every flower.5

In his choice of composition, Renoir was clearly influenced by the
spare and elegant flower paintings of Fantin-Latour, whose Chrysan-
themums, 1862 (fig. 59), was one of the earliest French paintings of
that flower. Like the Chrysanthemums, the flowers in Renoir's paint-
ing expand to fill the width of the canvas; both vase and ledge are
painted simply, with no indication of the interior in which they are
placed. Yet Fantin's crisp and controlled still life lacks the verve of
Renoir's more explosive array, which follows from his own Lilacs in a
Bowl (location unknown), painted in 1875 or 1878.6 In both paintings
the flowers enjoy an easy amplitude and expansiveness characteristic
of Renoir's painting at this time.

Bouquet of Chrysanthemums should be dated to the autumn of 1881,
and probably was painted either at the country house of his patron
Paul Berard, at Wargemont, outside Dieppe— where Renoir was a
visitor in July and September 1881— or back in Paris before he left
for Italy at the end of October.7 In its overall harmony the painting
recalls the portrait of Jeanne Henryot (private collection, Switzer-
land), and the still life's gentle, dappling light is also found in the
portrait of Alfred Berard with His Dog, 1881 (Philadelphia Museum of
Art).8 Renoir may also have been encouraged to paint chrysanthe-
mums after Monet had taken up the subject in a series of still lifes
painted at Vetheuil in 1880 and 1881— the two had shared flower
motifs before— and, indeed, the flower appears in a second canvas by
Renoir, the Girl with a Fan (fig. 60), painted the same year as Bouquet
of Chrysanthemums.9

Did the chrysanthemum hold any special significance for Renoir
and his peers? The flower had been cultivated in China and Japan
for centuries and was venerated in Eastern art as one of the four
noble plants painted by Chinese scholar-artists and as a preferred
motif in Japanese screen painting of the Kano school.10 Although the
plant's introduction to France was relatively recent— imported to
Marseille at the time of the Revolution, it seems to have been widely
cultivated only after the Napoleonic Wars — by the 1880s it was de-
scribed by botanical authorities as among the commonest ornamen-
tal garden plants, grown in French fields and meadows everywhere.11
If the more austere traditions of the flower were hidden from Ren-
oir— in seventeenth-century Chinese painting the chrysanthemum
was a symbol of the scholar in retirement, and in Japan it was the
emperor's insignia— its more general associations with the East were
not. The Girl with a Fan (fig. 60) refers explicitly to the Oriental
origins of the flower. Pointed in the direction of the red and white
chrysanthemums is a painted round fan, with a Chinese motif, prob-
ably made in Japan. Both flowers and fan, then, are Eastern imports
appropriated and made domestic by Parisian fashion. If it was the
exoticism of the chrysanthemums that had distinguished them from
other garden flowers, it was their autumnal message of renewal and
growth that had a lasting significance for Renoir; chrysanthemums

also provided the subject of one of his very last canvases.12

r J CBB

Pi er re- August e Renoir

FRENCH, 1841-1919

Landscape with Trees, c. 1886

WATERCOLOR ON PAPER, lO1/^ X l$l/4 INCHES

In this delicate and sensitive watercolor, published here for the
first time, Renoir described a secluded landscape in full sunlight.
Using the white of the paper in various ways— as border, as distant
background, as entry to the pathway— he applied washes of crimson,
mauve, and pea green to lay out the shadows and general contours of
his composition. Renoir's touch then became tighter and more con-
centrated and his color more vibrant in the depiction of the foliage,
shrubbery, and rolling hills of the foreground and middle ground.
The limbs of the tree on the left are created by the white paper itself:
tiny hatching strokes of green, purple, and ocher define this nega-
tive space with grace and economy. Despite his freedom of handling
and fluid application of color, Renoir never wavered in his sense of
structure and topography: we are drawn into the clearing by a dusty
pathway that disappears among the undulating hillocks and rocks of
the middle ground. Equally assured are his observations of the ef-
fects of intense sunlight. The russet foliage suggests leaves that have
dried out in the fierce heat, and the mauve washes in the foreground

evoke a dusty, somewhat parched landscape in which the trees fail to
give adequate comfort or shade.

In old age, when Renoir repetitively painted the landscape around
his farmhouse in Cagnes, he confessed to the continuing difficulties
he experienced with this subject: "I can't paint nature, I know, but
the hand-to-hand struggle with her stimulates me. A painter can't be
great if he doesn't understand landscape."1 Renoir's efforts to gain
mastery over his site and to organize it pictorially are apparent in the
deliberate and analytical approach he adopted in Landscape with
Trees.

Although it is not possible to identify the exact location of this
watercolor, the refined and fluent handling and rather precise delin-
eation of foliage suggest a date after 1885, when Renoir was return-
ing to an Ingresque manner. In its application of color and its varied
touch, the watercolor compares well with Landscape (Seattle Art
Museum), redated by Francois Daulte to 1886.2 The radiance and
joyous luminosity of Landscape with Trees also evokes a more sun-
filled setting: this sheet was probably executed during the summer of
1886, possibly while Renoir was staying with his wife and son at La
Roche-Guyon in the countryside northwest of Paris.3 Indeed, Land-
scape with Trees may have formed part of an album of such finished
topographical views executed in 1886; several watercolors of similar
dimensions and facture are known, and the possibility that Renoir
constituted a sketchbook of views in the manner of Cezanne cannot
be ruled out.4

CBB

PlERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

FRENCH, 1841-1919

Reclining Nude, 1883

oil on canvas, 255/s x 32 inches

R.enoir's ambition to paint the female nude is the single consis-
tent thread in his peripatetic existence of the early 1880s. Approach-
ing this elevated subject with the "gaucherie of an autodidact" (ac-
cording to Julius Meier-Graefe), he attacked the classical canon on a
variety of fronts: the journey from the Blond Bather, 1881 (The
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.) to
the great Bathers of 1885-87 (Philadelphia Museum of Art) was
neither inevitable nor directly routed, but loaded with experimenta-
tion. Reclining Nude, painted midway between these icons, is a good
example of Renoir's search for the appropriate idiom in which to
treat high art.1

Reclining on a mossy bank with the sea in the distant background,
her ruddy mane of hair braided in a heavy plait, Renoir's nude
dominates the autumnal landscape while remaining very much a
part of it. Although the overall effect is still sketchy, the nude's figure
is painted with great concentration, and her flesh and hair are
densely worked: strokes of pink, white, and mauve are applied insis-
tently to produce a fleshy form of real solidity. In contrast to this, the
landscape and sky are rendered hastily, the cream ground still visible
beneath the blues, reds, and greens surrounding the naked girl.

Renoir had difficulty with the pose— his foreshortening of the left
arm is not entirely successful — and he was indecisive about the de-
gree of nudity to portray: pentimenti show that the drapery initially
extended to cover more of his model's ample thigh. By placing the
figure resolutely within the landscape, he was obliged to attend to the
illusion of depth and mass, something no longer of overriding inter-
est to him. Thus, the model tends to float against the grassy bank;
we see, but do not feel, the weight she places on her left elbow; and
spatial recession into the slope beyond is blocked by the firm sur-
faces and insistent contours of her supine form.

For Meier-Graefe, such awkwardness constituted Renoir's supreme
skill, since it bore witness to the sincerity of his quest for a classical
language.2 Renoir himself noted that in treating the female nude
when he was forty, he was starting all over again.3 This remark has
particular poignancy here, since the Reclining Nude follows the for-
mat of the female acade'mie that had been a set student piece from
the eighteenth century (see fig. 61) and was still an exercise com-
monly undertaken by aspiring nineteenth-century artists (fig. 62).
But here Renoir was also paying homage to the master of the genre;
his figure conforms closely to Ingress Grande Odalisque, 1814 (fig.
63), but is pared of any reference to the seraglio. At this point,
Renoir could have seen the Grande Odalisque on only two occasions;
it was exhibited in 1867 and 1874, but did not enter the Louvre until
1899. 4 Renoir recounted to Meier-Graefe that his appreciation of
Ingress art had come only when he was copying Delacroix's Jewish
Wedding in the Louvre for his patron Jean Dollfus in 1875. Hanging

next to Delacroix's painting was Ingress portrait of Mme Riviere, to
which his eye returned again and again.5 Yet Ingres was far from an
obvious model for the Impressionists, and if the sensuous arabesques
of the Reclining Nude make comparison with the Grande Odalisque
unavoidable, the painting itself, with its textured handling and
warm, ruddy hues, is paradoxically the least Ingresque of all his
nudes of this period.6

But Renoir did more than simply graft his style onto a venerable
academic tradition. His Reclining Nude is rooted in direct experience
and observation, and it is from the fusion of the two that Renoir's
nudes derive their stature. After a summer in Normandy as guests of
several wealthy clients, Renoir and his wife Aline Charigot spent
September of 1883 in Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands between
England and France.7 Renoir was charmed by the island's beaches
and rocky coves, and even more so by the uninhibited behavior of
the young English holidaymakers, whose freedom and naturalness
he found particularly appealing. "Here one bathes by the rocks,
which also serve as changing rooms, because there is nowhere else to
go," he wrote to Paul Durand-Ruel on September 27, 1883. 'And you
cannot imagine how pretty it all looks, with men and women lying
together on the rocks. It's more like a Watteau landscape than the
real world." The unexpected informality of the bathers there — as
opposed to the elegance of the Normandy resorts — provided him
with "a source of real motifs" that he could use "later on." He would
leave Guernsey at the beginning of October, he continued, "with a
few canvases and some documents from which to make paintings in
Paris." He concluded this letter by recounting the pleasure he had
taken in "surprising a group of young girls changing into their
bathing costumes, who, although English, did not seem at all
alarmed."8

This vivid letter immediately brings to mind the easy sensuality of
the Reclining Nude, and the painting should be related to Renoir's
experience of Guernsey and dated to late 1883. Although it has been
placed at various dates in the 1880s, Francois Daulte was the first to
suggest the convincing date of 1883, ba .ed, presumably, on compari-
son with Renoir's signed and dated Nude in a Landscape (fig. 64 ).9
The Annenberg painting, however, has a distinctive russet tonality,
and the handling of the nude is more even and carefully worked than
in the Parisian painting. It is closer to By the Seashore (fig. 65), secure-
ly dated to the Guernsey visit of autumn 1883, in which the summary
handling of the expansive coastal setting, where orange reds and
greens predominate, is very like the treatment of the background in
this painting.10

Renoir would use the pose of the Reclining Nude in several paint-
ings of the 1890s, notably the Reclining Nude, 1890 (Norton Simon
Foundation, Los Angeles) and Bathers in the Forest, 1897 (The Barnes
Foundation, Merion, Pa.)." The Annenberg Reclining Nude does not
seem to have been intended for exhibition — by reason, no doubt, of
its exploratory nature— and may well have been given by the artist
himself to Arsene Alexandre, the prominent art critic and supporter
of Renoir's work, whose small collection boasted three other nude
compositions from the early 1880s, including the full-scale chalk
drawing for the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Bathers, which is now
in the Louvre.12

CBB

Pi er re- August e Renoir

FRENCH, 1841-1919

The Daughters of Catulle Mendes, 1888

OIL ON CANVAS, 6^/4 X 5ll/s INCHES

Th e portrait of The Daughters of Catulle Mendes was the most
ambitious and most recently painted of the twenty-four works Renoir
submitted to the Impressionist exhibition that opened at Durand-
Ruel's gallery, 11 rue Lepelletier, on May 25, 1888.1 Renoir seems to
have started work on it the last week of April, with the forthcoming
exhibition very much in mind."There's something good about figure
paintings," he wrote to the father of the sitters. "They're interesting,
but nobody wants them."2 However, as Theodore Duret first pointed
out, the portrait may not have been a commission in the strictest
sense: "Mendes had long been an admirer of Renoir's, who, in re-
turn, wanted to do a portrait of his daughters, whom he found to be
charming, as indeed they were."3 This was also an opportunity for
Renoir to reassert himself as master of a lucrative genre in which he
had been preeminent a decade earlier. Such a hypothesis is con-
firmed, in fact, by the letter Renoir wrote to Mendes in late April,
shortly after returning to Paris from visiting his ailing mother in
Louveciennes. This letter, which has somehow escaped the attention
of Renoir scholars, is revelatory; it throws new light on the genesis of
the portrait of Mendes's daughters and also provides information on
Renoir's working method. It deserves to be quoted in full: "My dear
friend, I have just returned to Paris and beg you to tell me immedi-
ately if you want portraits done of your beautiful children. I shall
exhibit them at Petit's Gallery [a mistake for Durand-Ruel] in May, so
you can see why I am in such a hurry. Here are my terms, which I am
sure you will find acceptable. Five hundred francs for the three, life
size and all together. The eldest girl, seated at the piano, turns to give
the note to her sister, who finds it on her violin. The youngest,
leaning against the piano, listens on as one must do at that tender

age. I shall do the drawings at your house, and the portrait at mine.
PS. The 500 francs are payable 100 francs a month."4

Renoir jotted down a quick sketch of the portrait on the letter (fig.
66), which shows that he first conceived of it in a horizontal format
similar to Children's Afternoon at Wargemont (fig. 67), the portrait of
the Berard children he had painted in 1884.5 None of the interven-
ing drawings he made chez Mendes are known, but in the course of
working out the composition Renoir altered the format and reduced
the act of tuning up to the minimum. Whether he worked exclusively
from drawings, or used photographs of the three girls as well, re-
mains to be established, given the speed with which he painted and
the scant opportunity he had to work with the sitters in front of him.

The letter also lays to rest the myth that Mendes paid the trifling
sum of 100 francs for this grand portrait, often cited as an example of
the low esteem in which Renoir's transitional paintings were held.6
Compared to the prices fetched by established Salon painters — and
even, by the late 1880s, by Renoir's fellow Impressionists Monet and
Degas— 500 francs was low, although it represented the annual
salary of a schoolteacher at that time.7 But it was more a prix d'ami
than an official transaction, for Mendes, who had known Renoir
since 1869, was not a collector of Impressionist paintings and
owned no other work by him— and the circumstances of the commis-
sion were unusual, to say the least. Renoir's jaunty request to Mendes
in November 1888 for 100 francs, which carried with it little sense of
outrage, was, therefore, a reminder that the final installment for the
painting was due, and not, as has previously been suggested, a plea
for overdue payment.8

If Renoir had hoped to reaffirm his reputation as a portraitist
after his showing at Durand-Ruel's, he was at first disappointed.
Berthe Morisot, whom Renoir had persuaded to exhibit alongside
him, informed Monet that the exhibition had been a "complete
fiasco," although Renoir and Whistler were the least to blame.9
Three months after the exhibition closed, Renoir was still smarting
from adverse criticism and lamented to Pissarro that he had received
no further portrait commissions.10 He even submitted The Daughters
of Catulle Mendes to the Salon of 1890— his last appearance there had
been in 1883— but the painting was hung too high to be seen:

Arsene Alexandre commented that the organizers had "assassinat-
ed" the portrait, and Renoir still bitterly recalled the episode in a
newspaper interview he gave at the height of his fame in 1904."

Renoir's "Salon painting" — the term is Julius Meier-Graefe' s — rep-
resented Renoir's most ambitious attempt yet to reconcile his linear
style of the mid-i88os with the more natural painterly and colorist
instincts he could never entirely suppress.12 It is richer in handling
than the portrait of Julie Manet (fig 68), painted in 1887, and more
animated, despite its monumentality, than the portrait of Marie
Durand-Ruel (fig. 69), painted in 1888 and which Renoir himself
found "monotonous."13

Remarkably direct and assured, both in conception and execution,
the portrait of The Daughters of Catulle Mendes may have been worked
out over several sittings, but with a minimum of reworking. Renoir
had some trouble placing the eldest daughter's left hand — pentimenti
of flesh tones can be seen through the piano board — and he may also
have shifted the line of her hem. But such changes are very slight. He
applied the paint in lush, opaque layers of unmediated hue: with the
exception of the richly impasted vase of flowers on the piano, proba-
bly painted last of all, there is an effortless consistency in Renoir's
handling here. No single element is given prominence, and the
brushwork is disguised to produce a paint surface that, while oily, has
the sheen of porcelain.

And yet Renoir's finish is highly idiosyncratic and his colorism
almost abstract. The luminosity and vibrancy of the portrait is
achieved by a precarious balance between sitters and setting, in
which both are given equal emphasis. Strokes of mauve and orange
on the white dresses and highlights of red in the girls' magnificent
tawny tresses maintain the pitch established by the orange reds of
the curtain in the background and the piano and floorboards in the
foreground. These elements, which Renoir treated synthetically, are
described no differently than the young girls themselves. Thus, the
patch of hair at the end of the eldest daughter's pigtail, with its
highlights of red and brown, is painted in the same way as the
parquet floor below. The cloth that covers the upright piano and the
sheet music underneath the vase and on the music stand are identical
in handling and tone to the youngest girl's hair and dress. It is this
new preoccupation with value that so impressed Felix Feneon in his
sympathetic review of Durand-Ruel's 1888 exhibition;14 and Renoir's
quest for pictorial unity was fully endorsed by Pissarro, whose exper-
iments with pointillism at this time reflect a similar reassessment of
Impressionist technique.15

The portrait of The Daughters of Catulle Mendes has been reason-
ably compared with portraits of the children of wealthy clients such
as Cahen d'Anvers and Paul Berard from earlier in the 1880s, as well
as a group of slightly later paintings that depict young women
around a piano (fig. 70) — the most celebrated of which, Young
Women at the Piano, 1892 (Musee d'Orsay, Paris), commissioned for
the Musee du Luxembourg in the winter of 1891, exists in five
versions.16 However, none of these examples correspond in facture

to the robust yet highly controlled manner of painting that charac-
terizes the portrait of the Mendes girls, which is closest in handling
to the sumptuous Bather (private collection, Tokyo), painted at al-
most the same time.17 Of interest here is Renoir's capacity to main-
tain the energy and vibrancy of the smaller Bather on the grander
and more public scale of his group portrait, which Meier-Graefe
described as painted with the vehemence of a Frans Hals.18 By 1890
Renoir would return to an altogether more subdued style, in which
his figures are highly colored and increasingly idealized and where
surface animation is completely suppressed.

Claude Roger-Marx rightly identified the period from 1888 to
1890 as marking a transition between styles, but saw the seductive, if
dissonant, paintings of these years as "works of convalescence."19
Another interpretation is possible. The new vitality in Renoir's
Daughters of Catulle Mendes might be explained as an instinctive
response to the French painters of his beloved eighteenth century,
whose work held particular appeal in the late 1880s. "Those people
who appeared never to paint nature knew more than we do," he
wrote to Durand-Ruel in the autumn of 1888, and it is helpful to
consider the Mendes portrait in the light of this comment.20 Renoir's
debt to the eighteenth century, and to Fragonard in particular, went
beyond sharing motifs and appropriating a certain rococo charm: it
derived from an appreciation of the artificiality of eighteenth-centu-
ry genre painting, its distance from a straightforward description of
reality, its urgent stylization. Fragonard's celebrated Music Lesson
(fig. 71) may well have been in Renoir's mind when painting the
Mendes children, but his understanding of rococo fantasy informs
the painting in a more general way.21

Renoir's portrait of The Daughters of Catulle Mendes is one of his
most compelling images of awakening adolescence and has been
widely documented as such. It has imposed its charm on commen-
tators otherwise troubled by the metallic lighting and stylized fea-
tures of the young girls. Gustave Geffroy, in his review of the 1890
Salon, called the portrait "an intimate poem celebrating the instincts
of childhood and the stirrings of the intellect."22 Yet it demon-
strates once again Renoir's unerring capacity for idealization and
romance: the serene and self-assured poses assumed by Claudine,
Huguette, and Helyonne (reading from left to right) betray nothing
of the turbulent and highly unconventional menage to which they
belonged.

For Renoir's sitters were the offspring of a longstanding liaison
between the Parnassian poet, publicist, and impressario Catulle
Mendes (1841-1909) (fig. 72)— born in Bordeaux, of Portuguese-
Jewish extraction— and the soprano and composer, Augusta Holmes
(1847-1903)— born in Paris of Irish parentage, whose reputation
for "song and seduction" was legendary in Belle Epoque Paris.23
Mendes, one of the most influential and prolific French authors of
the second half of the nineteenth century, had founded the Revue
Fantaisiste in 1861— one of the first journals to publish Baudelaire,
Theophile Gautier, and Theodore de Banville— and soon became a

central figure in the group of neoclassical poets known as the Par-
nassians. An ardent Wagnerian and a playwright and librettist of
some distinction, Mendes was editor-in-chief of several prominent
literary journals and in this capacity was able to sponsor a generation
of symbolist writers. In 1897 he established readings of early French
poetry at the Odeon theater in Paris and in 1900 was commissioned
to write the official report on French poetry of the second half of the
nineteenth century.24

Mendes's literary energies were equaled only by his libidinous
adventures, and he was notorious even in an age generally tolerant
of irregular behavior. The Goncourts described the nocturnal activi-
ties of this "cast-off Bohemian" in salacious detail, writing admir-
ingly of "this anemic-looking figure, whose nights are a ceaseless
round of coition and copulation," constantly amazed that one in
whom "the flame of love" burned so ardently could maintain such an
enormous literary production.25 Married in 1866 to Gautier's eccen-
tric daughter, Judith, Mendes abandoned her in 1874 for Augusta
Holmes, whom he had seduced at Bayreuth. Five children were born
of their union: a child died in infancy, and Raphael, the eldest, and
only boy, died at the age of sixteen in 1896 — but Holmes and Mendes
were never married and led a turbulent life together. In November
1885, Mallarme mentioned their impending separation to an En-
glish correspondent: "Things are no longer charming between
them."26 By this time, Mendes's liaison with the stage actress Marga-
ret Moreno, a leading lady and a friend of Sarah Bernhardt, was
public knowledge. The breach between Mendes and Holmes was
briefly repaired— the couple were together again when Renoir's por-
trait was painted— but the "long concubinage" came to an end in the
early 1890s. In 1894 Mendes had his family recognize his children
by Holmes, and three years later he married Jane Mette, a writer
twenty-six years his junior, with whom he lived peacefully until his
death in a train accident in February igog.27

In Augusta Holmes, Mendes had found a woman worthy of him.
Daughter of an Irish cavalry officer who had settled in France, she
was brought up at Versailles and quickly showed an aptitude for
poetry, languages, and music. She was reputed to be a great beauty
and posed as the model for Henri Regnault's Thetis Delivering Arms to
Achilles, his Prix de Rome of 1866, and was renowned above all for
"her golden tresses that fell in waves and beautiful ...eyes that were
like the seas of Ireland"— attributes her daughters inherited from
her in generous proportions.28 An enthusiastic Wagnerian and virtu-
oso pianist, she was proposed marriage by Camille Saint-Saens and
studied under Cesar Franck. She began composing in the 1870s and
from this time dramatic symphonies and symphonic poems flowed
from her pen. A measure of her success was the commission to write
the Ode Triomphale for the Revolution, after Charles Gounod de-

clined the honor. The work was performed at the Palais de l'lndus-
trie in September 1889 by some nine hundred singers and three
hundred musicians.29 Like Mendes's writing, her music is largely
forgotten today, although the songs have survived better than the
large-scale work. When the American opera singer and composer
Ethel Smyth met her in 1899, Holmes's fame had already waned,
although Smyth praised her Chanson de Gars d'Irlande as a "fierce
song" that would have gone around the world had there been any
demand for a song in French dedicated to Irish home rule.30

The three daughters of this extraordinary couple owed their gold-
en hair and lily-white complexions to their mother's Irish good looks,
and their medieval names to their father's passion for the era of
Ronsard and the poets of the Pleiad. Despite the hostile comments
Mendes's behavior generally solicited, his deep affection for his chil-
dren and his sense of responsibility toward them emerge clearly.
"There is something in Mendes of the Jew who loves his children
more than his wife; survival of the race" was the barbed insight of the
novelist Jules Renard.31 The Goncourts, who found Holmes's singing
and pontificating intolerable, reported in May 1895 that she detest-
ed children, took little interest in them, and that they were now
legally in their father's charge.32 Mendes's grief at the unexpected
death of his eldest child, Raphael, in July 1896, is attested to in a
moving letter from Mallarme.33

Brought up in the Mendes's family home at Chatou by Catulle's
sister, the young girls were protected from the unconventional world
in which both parents lived. Henri Barbusse, the poet and polemicist
who married Helyonne, the youngest daughter, in 1898, recorded
the impressions of his first visit to Chatou in a passage that brings
Renoir's portrait immediately to mind: "They are all very blond and
very pretty, Huguette, Claudine, Helyonne. They live far from the
world of artists, actors, and writers .. They are very playful, very
cheerful, a little shy, and very well behaved. Claudine [the middle
daughter] is perhaps more outgoing, more straightforward, more
friendly. Huguette [the eldest], rather more exquisite, with some-
thing delicate and quivering about her. Helyonne [the youngest] is a
reserved child, but she is extraordinarily beautiful."34

We are not informed as to how well Renoir knew the young girls —
he often visited Mendes at 4 cite de Trevise, his second-floor Parisian
apartment, with its distinctive Japanese curtains, and he must have
met the children there many times.35 In this portrait, however, he
achieved both intimacy and monumentality, capturing the beauty
and purity of Mendes's three daughters with instinctive economy and
conviction, and alluding to the energetic literary milieu in which
their notorious father moved by the most discreet of symbols: the
lemon-colored modern paperback novel on top of the piano.36

Claude Monet

FRENCH, 1840-1926

Camille Monet on a Garden Bench
(The Bench), 1873

OIL ON CANVAS, 2^8 X 315/fe INCHES

Toward the end of December 1871, Monet, his wife Camille
Doncieux (1847-1879), and their four-and-a-half-year-old son Jean
left Paris for the neighboring suburb of Argenteuil, where they
would live for the next seven years. For the substantial sum of one
thousand francs per annum, they rented a large villa for three years
on the boulevard Saint-Denis (fig 73) from Emilie- Jeanne Aubry, to
whom Manet had recommended them.1 Monet remembered imme-
diately removing the screens from the windows of the large atelier at
the Maison Aubry— the previous tenant, the realist painter Theo-
dule Ribot (1823-1891), had converted this room into an "obscure
dungeon"— and he recalled with delight the view from the windows
that looked onto the Seine.2 Yet, of all the vistas, it was the view of
the extensive garden, some two thousand square meters in size, that
appealed particularly to him, and he would paint it from a variety of
aspects during the three years he and his family remained in this
house.3

In The Bench, the garden is at its most formal and orderly. Walled in
on two sides, with geraniums planted in a neatly trimmed border, the
garden becomes the setting for one of Monet's rare plein-air figure
paintings. Camille Monet, elegantly attired and seated on a garden
bench, leans forward with her elbow resting on her lap. She appears
to turn toward an unexpected observer, and holds a letter in her
gloved hand. Discarded to her left is a bouquet of flowers, presum-
ably offered by the man who leans languidly against the bench and
gazes down at her, his eyes crinkled by a smile hidden beneath his
beard. The identity of this gentleman caller has caused endless spec-
ulation; Monet, in old age, remembered him simply as a neighbor
from Argenteuil.4

Monet recorded the afternoon light in spectacular intensity. The
geraniums and the featureless woman to the left are portrayed in

direct sunlight, and the vibrancy of the background is maintained
through the optical mixture of reds and greens. The colors darken
somewhat on the right, where the shrubbery is shaded by the over-
hanging tree. By contrast, the figures in the foreground are in
shade, but so bright is the afternoon sky that they are practically
modeled in blue. The slats of the green bench reflect the full force of
the afternoon sky and are painted sky blue; the gray trousers of the
smiling visitor are edged with a stripe of the same hue, as is the
upper part of his hand. The bridge of the man's nose is described in
blue gray, as is Camille's. Her hair, peeking out from under her little
hat, is painted blue black.

Never before had Monet translated his observations of the way
sunlight models form with such precision. In this highly analytical
painting, he explored how the effects of both filtered and direct
light modify and, in some instances, eliminate local color. In achiev-
ing this, he experimented with a register of hues so heightened that
it allowed him no extension.

Monet's handling of paint is similarly audacious and assured. Rich,
unmediated color is applied in swift dabs and strokes, and his tech-
nique is succinct: only in the mound of geraniums did he create
surface by using successive layers of paint. The cream ground, visible
in patches under Camille's dress and in the lower section of the
bench to her left, has no pictorial function here; it is not yet em-
ployed to suggest space or structure. The artist tackled a variety of
forms with impressive confidence: his vocabulary changed from the
tight, concentrated dabs of color on the flora in the background to
the quickly brushed sweeps of blue gray and black on the costumes of
the figures in front. The bouquet of flowers was painted wet on wet
with no revision; the ribs of the bench still bear the marks of the
brush swiftly trailing across the canvas. Yet, if the flounce of Ca-
mille's crinolines and the kaleidoscope of geraniums are bravura
effects, Monet's to.uch became suddenly tender and feathery in the
painting of her face and hat: Camille's features are enlivened by the
most delicate hatching strokes of pink, blue, and red.

However, the boldness and economy of Monet's language cannot
disguise an inarticulateness that is at the very core of this composi-
tion. For all its solidity of form— the unhesitating touch, the joyous
color, the monumentality of the central figure— The Bench remains
one of the most enigmatic and disconcerting works in Monet's
oeuvre. The use of language is masterful; but what is Monet trying
to say?

Certainly the genre itself was not new to him. Monet's ambitious
decoration inspired by Manet's painting of the same title, Le Dejeuner
sur Vherbe (Musee d'Orsay, Paris), in which Courbet had appeared,
had been painted eight years earlier. The lush depiction of a family
garden had provided the subject for such great works as Terrace at
Sainte-Adresse, 1867 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
and Jeanne-Marguerite in the Garden, 1868 (The Hermitage, Lenin-
grad).5 With these paintings in mind, Zola had praised this strain in
Monet's work as the richest and most promising: "Like a true Pari-
sian, he brings Paris to the country and is incapable of painting a
landscape without including well-dressed men and women. He loses
interest in nature once it no longer bears the mark of everyday life."6
Although Zola's insight dates from 1868, and would become less
relevant for Monet's work as it developed after the mid-i87os, it
serves nonetheless as a starting point for discussion of The Bench. For
what distinguishes this painting from Monet's earlier figure paint-
ings of the 1860s is a transformation in milieu. Monet is no longer
the artist who brings Paris to the countryside: he brings Paris to the
suburbs.7 By the 1870s, Argenteuil — with its regattas, bicycle races,
and fifteen-minute train journey from the Gare de l'Ouest — was not
merely the capital of Parisian recreation. It was being colonized by
members of the Parisian middle classes, who established both pri-
mary and secondary residences there, much to the annoyance of
older inhabitants, who complained of large amounts of land being
sold off to build "bourgeois houses with stylish gardens surrounded
by walls and closed off on their facades by iron gates."8 The Maison
Aubry, enclosed in its spacious grounds, was such a property. It is
the house on the far left in Monet's painting of the boulevard Saint-
Denis (fig. 74). Although Monet was only a tenant, and frequently
late with his rent, his allegiances were to this Parisian world, and his
aspirations were impeccably bourgeois. So respectable and mani-
cured is the garden in The Bench, so far removed from the wind-
swept, untidy corner of the same garden Monet painted again the
same year (fig. 75), that it seems legitimate to question Monet's
naturalism here. The discomfort and malaise of his two figures only
reinforce the tension that pervades this highly colored scene.

This sense of deep unease has frequently been explained in simple
biographical terms. Argenteuil, the argument runs, provided Monet
with an escape, a retreat, from the rigors of city life, allowing him a
"personal dialogue with nature." Yet this newly found harmony of
existence was undermined by the emptiness and boredom of his
marriage and by the isolation and alienation he experienced as an
effect of burgeoning industrialization and urban development.9
Thus interpreted, The Bench communicates the marital tensions
Monet and Camille experienced; but it has also been read as an essay
on courtship.10 Alternatively, it represents amorous flirtation," and
yet another interpretation sees the smiling, rather sinister man as
Monet's "smug proprietor."12

One of the more suggestive biographical readings has attempted
to relate The Bench to a firmly documented event: the death of
Camille's father, Charles-Claude Doncieux.13 Writing to Pissarro on
September 23, 1873, Monet informed him: "A piece of bad news
awaited my wife on her return from Pontoise: her father died yester-
day. Of course, we are obliged to go into mourning."14 Thus, Camille
is portrayed in The Bench wearing mourning dress; her somber ex-
pression is explained by her grief; and the mysterious visitor either
offers condolences (in the form of a bouquet) or may be seen as a
symbol of death itself.

Joel Isaac son also sought a clue to The Bench 's ambiguous narrative
by examining its pendant, the striking Camille in the Garden with Jean

and His Nurse (fig. 76), in which Camille confronts the spectator
with a gaze that is almost insolent. There, he argued, Camille was
dressed in half mourning, in a costume appropriate for the second
half of the year of mourning prescribed for a daughter, and on the
strength of this he proposed a date of around June 1874 for both
paintings.15 Not only does this argument overlook the evidence of
the signature on Camille in the Garden with Jean and His Nurse — which
is signed and dated 1873— but f"aus to acknowledge the byzantine
customs of mourning dress in France. Nineteenth-century mourn-
ing dress was not a specific costume, for which one could locate
designated prototypes. Rather, it was a reordering of the wardrobe
to stress certain elements and to display as much black as possible. In
a suburban town such as Argenteuil, the wearing of elaborate
mourning dress would communicate not only bereavement but
status, and servants would be expected to wear attire of a similar
nature.16 If Monet did indeed paint Camille in mourning dress in The
Bench, this would be consistent with the other elements of bourgeois
existence that are emphasized here: the well-tended walled garden,
the black frock coat and top hat, the fashionable crinolines.

It is, however, impossible to prove that The Bench is a testament to
Camille's mourning, although it is intriguing that Camille is also
shown in a black dress in Monet's celebrated Poppies at Argenteuil
( Musee d'Orsay, Paris), purchased by Durand-Ruel in December 1873
and possibly painted while she was in mourning.17 It is also clear that
a strictly biographical reading diminishes the painting and fails to
explain the uncertainty and agitation that create its singular mood.
Even so, Isaacson's discussion focuses attention on the major issues —
costume and narrative— and it is here that some key to the painting's
meaning might be discovered.

Elegant Parisians enjoying the pleasures of the country: even if the
realities of Argenteuil intervened to complicate this bucolic image,
the theme itself was not new in nineteenth-century art. Yet it had
rarely been confronted with any seriousness. Daumier's lithographs
of the 1850s had ridiculed overdressed Parisians sweltering in un-
shaded fields, portraying them as intrepid explorers venturing forth
into uncharted terrain (fig. 77).18 By the 1860s, the journalist Eu-
gene Chapus observed: "Everyone in the middle class wants to have
his little house with trees, roses, dahlias, his big or little garden, his
rural argentea mediocritas!'19 Daumier's amusing squibs attacked this
pretension with like scorn (fig. 78), and thus the subject of The Bench
was introduced, a generation earlier, on the pages of the illustrated
journal. But where Daumier satirized, Monet equivocated. Camille's
wide-eyed and troubled expression— but one that is ultimately mean-
ingless, given the problems of narrative— recalls the staring manne-
quins of the fashion plate (fig. 79), a source of popular imagery with
a more elegant resonance than the mocking lithographs in Le Chari-
vari.20 Indeed, she and her companion might have been modeling
their costumes for the latest edition of La Mode Illustree, in which the
garden setting with bench was a favorite motif. For Monet, the
fashion plate takes the place of the old master print: in the develop-
ment of this figure painting, La Mode Illustree has a function similar
to Marcantonio Raimondi's Judgment of Paris in the creation of
Manet's Dejeuner sur Vherbe.

Monet does not acknowledge the gulf between the ephemeral
publications of Paris fashion and the exalted genre of narrative
painting. He takes fashion very seriously, not as Baudelaire's flaneur
—detached and objective— but as consumer. In The Bench, the cos-
tume Camille wears is very much a la mode. Her toque is trimmed
with lace and f lowers, a ribbon hanging from behind. Her hands are
gloved; she wears an overskirt, trimmed with velvet, above a more

5°

fully tiered and layered underskirt, and a jacket with oversized cuffs
of velvet. This up-to-date ensemble (the dress can be dated c. March
1873) is very close to the spring costume advertised in La Mode
Illustre'e (fig. 80) and described as "a dress of velvet and damask, in
olive green, with a pleated, flounced skirt, the tunic made of damask
and similar in color to the velvet."21 Yet, the transition from fashion
plate to figure painting is unmediated, and thus falters. Monet's
commitment to the heroism of everyday life is literal: he has no time
for Daumier's derision and breaks equally with the insinuating clari-
ty of painters of fashion such as Tissot (fig. 81). But despite his deep
concern for costume and property, and his willingness to ennoble
them, The Bench conveys no lucid message; it merely hints at drama.

Monet's attempt to revitalize narrative figure painting through a
truly modern idiom is a poignant and grandiose undertaking that
finally fails. Rarely had he struggled to fuse so many disparate ele-
ments to convey what Zola had termed "the exact analysis and inter-
esting study of the present."22 In doing this, he had also looked back
to a tradition well established in the history of art, but characteristic
above all of eighteenth-century French painting: the pairing of
images in pendants, works linked by size, subject, and composition.23
Both The Bench and its companion of almost identical dimensions,
Camille in the Garden with Jean and His Nurse, portray the same spot
in the garden of the Maison Aubry (in the latter, Monet has moved
back a little to include more of the garden wall).24 The paintings
must have been painted within days of each other and were probably
meant to hang together. Many years later Monet hinted as much, in a
reply to an inquiry about the identity of the figures in The Bench.
Writing in June 1921 to Georges Durand-Ruel, he noted, "There
must be two paintings of the same genre."25 The two paintings satisfy
the requirements of pendants at almost every level: they each have
three figures; the color harmonies are the same (black against red
and green); and the compositions balance one another — Camille in
the Garden with Jean is weighted to the left, The Bench to the right.
Even the signatures are symmetrical. Yet the pendants provide no
mutual reinforcement of narrative; they do not relate in terms of
"before" and "after," an anecdotal trait much employed in conven-
tional genre painting of the period. They share simply an aspiration
toward legibility, each portraying a moment pregnant with meaning,
yet rendered inexplicable by Monet's confident brush.

A lucid and sensitive appraisal of The Bench has recently described
this painting as one in which Monet came closest "to the kind of
modern conversation piece that was so important to both Manet and
Degas, although it has none of their wit or nervousness."26 An inves-
tigation of the painting's disparate sources, as well as the context in
which it was painted, further helps to identify its powerful irresolu-
tion. For The Bench marks a watershed: Monet's great Luncheon (Ar-
genteuil) (fig. 82), painted shortly after the pendants, rearranges the
same elements on a far larger scale, and he finally resolves the
challenge of narrative by virtually suppressing the figures alto-
gether. Here the women are reduced to staffage, barely visible be-
hind the branches of the overhanging trees; Jean plays contentedly
by the same garden bench, but his presence there is an afterthought.
Setting has finally triumphed over sitter, and the shift toward land-
scape would thenceforth be irresistible in Monet's work.27

Yet, in the final analysis, the self-referential qualities of The Bench
are overwhelming. Something of the painting's enigma may be ex-
plained by the ambiguities inherent in Monet's own position as an
artist during the latter part of 1873, and here the crucial text is
Duranty's program for an iconography of modernity, published as a
review of the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876. In his en-

couragement of "modern conversation pieces" very much in the
manner of The Bench, Duranty wrote: 'As we are solidly embracing
nature, we will no longer separate the figure from the background
of an apartment or the street. In actuality, a person never appears
against neutral or vague backgrounds. Instead, surrounding him
and behind him are the furniture, fireplaces, curtains, and walls that
indicate his financial position, class, and profession."28 Transposed
to the gardens of his rented villa at Argenteuil, The Bench makes a
statement on Monet's "financial position, class and profession." The
artist's income for the years 1872 and 1873 nad been unprecedented:
largely through Durand-Ruel's patronage, he received 12,100 francs
for thirty-eight paintings sold in 1872 and more than double that
amount — 24,800 francs — the following year.29 Such recent affluence
is mirrored in the elegant setting of The Bench — the impeccable frock
coat and walking dress, the reluctant assertiveness of Camille, at age
twenty-six the well-to-do maitresse de maison. Furthermore, as a
member of the provincial bourgeoisie, whose parents were more
tolerant of their son's aspirations as an artist than of his liaison with
his obscure "mistress" from Lyon, Monet may have felt more com-
fortable in the Parisian colony at Argenteuil than he cared to
admit.30 However, all of this was compounded by another activity
that fully engaged Monet during much of 1873: his organizing a
painter's cooperative with Pissarro, the "Societe anonyme coopera-
tive d'artistes-peintres, sculpteurs, etc.," whose charter, based on a
baker's union, was finally drawn up in December 1873. The syndical-
ist structure of the Impressionists' founding organization linked the
enterprise to a radical constituency that proved increasingly uncom-
fortable for all the charter members except Pissarro.31 It was certain-
ly at odds with the image of domestic tension and bourgeois compla-
cency that is so forcefully conveyed in The Bench.

Thus the provincial newlyweds and their illegitimate son ha%e
become Parisians established in the better section of Argenteuil, the
factories and chemical stench out of sight. The mistress from Lyon is
transformed into the lady of the manor. The painter of everyday life,
armed with Zola's and Manet's blessings, has courted and organized
opposition as an artiste inde'pendant. This accretion of personal con-
tradictions strained the amalgam of conflicting sources to the break-
ing point: The Bench contains these elements precariously — mystify-
ing in its narrative intentions, disconcerting in its promiscuous
appropriation of old and new. The Bench is Monet's genre painting as
Interior (Philadelphia Museum of Art) is Degas's: it represents the
brief moment when he took on a subject category that was created
by Manet and Degas.32 Despite his command of their syntax and his
forceful expression of it, this painting lacks the psychological acuity
of their best work. The Bench remains, nonetheless, an extraordinary
painting, but one that was without progeny and without solution.

Although it is unclear for whom The Bench and its companion were
painted, the two paintings were divided early on, The Bench entering
the prestigious collection of Eduard Arnhold (1849-1925) by 1903,
when it appeared in public exhibition in Berlin for the first time.33
This accounts for its reproduction in several unlikely German publi-
cations, and the absence of commentary on the painting in early
French studies on Monet. A recently discovered photograph of Arn-
hold's picture gallery (fig. 83) shows that The Bench hung in exalted
company, between Manet's The Artist: Portrait of Marcellin Desboutin,
1875 (Museu de Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo,) and Young Woman in
Spanish Costume, 1862 (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven), and
as a pair to one of his versions of La Grenouillere.34

C.RR

Claude Monet

FRENCH, 1840-1926

Poppy Field, Argenteuil, 1875
oil on canvas, 215/i6 x 29 inches

In the summer of 1875, Monet painted four very similar views of
the neighboring fields of the plain of Gennevilliers, just southeast of
Argenteuil (figs. 84-86). 1 These were not the first entirely rustic
landscapes he had painted at Argenteuil— the celebrated Poppies at
Argenteuil (Musee d'Orsay, Paris) dates from 1873 — Dut they rigor-
ously suppress any reference to those aspects of suburban life that
had furnished Monet with the subject of his landscapes for the pre-
vious two and a half years.

The Annenberg Poppy Field records a summer's afternoon with
rolling clouds set against a deep blue sky. The two poplars seen in the
distance on the far left of the canvas mark the bank of the Seine as it
flows north toward Epinay: the silvery river is just visible through
them.2 Standing in the poppy field, Monet's eight-year-old son Jean
clasps an unidentifiable object in his left hand. In the foreground,
two imposing poplars connect almost at a right angle with the flower-
ing field. This L-shaped armature corresponds in a general way to
the proportions of the golden section; the composition as a whole
recalls both Ruysdael and Constable. Yet, it is saved from being
formulaic by the thrusting diagonals of the flowering field that
recedes in a wide curve to the left, trailing away into the distance
behind the second large poplar. To balance his composition, Monet
reverted to a favored device: lines of yellow and white paint, dragged
across the middle ground above Jean's straw hat, admirably evoke the
sun bursting through the clouds onto the green fields below.

Monet's handling here is much freer and far more broken up than
in the earlier The Bench (p. 46), the paint now applied in flickering
dabs and strokes of color, with the buff ground particularly active in
the lower half of the canvas as part of the field. Dots of red in the
dense green foliage of the first large poplar, and, to a lesser degree,
along the bark and treetop of the second, maintain the vibrancy
Monet achieved in the painting of the poppy field itself. Calligraphic
strokes of red, blue, green, and white — an explosion of color — are
balanced by the denser passages of blue and white in the sky, where
the exposed priming gives depth and texture to the clouds.

Although Monet did not exhibit this painting in the Second Im-
pressionist Exhibition of 1876, it is just the sort of "transcript from
nature" that Mallarme described so well in September 1876. Argu-
ing that the landscapes of Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro were complete

works and that their sketchy appearance was a contrived effect,
Mallarme concluded: "In these instantaneous and voluntary pictures

all is harmonious, and [would be] spoiled by a touch more or less "s

Monet's four views of the fields of Gennevilliers do indeed have a
determined, carefully constructed feel to them: their intensity has
led the historian of Monet's Argenteuil period to conclude that they
represent "not only summer personified, but also summer pre-
served."4

There is a hidden poignancy to the peaceful and bucolic image
that Monet has achieved in this group of paintings. The meadows
and fields of Gennevilliers were seriously threatened at this time:
they stood to become the dumping ground for untreated sewage
waste piped out from the city of Paris. Baron Haussmann's adminis-
tration had first experimented with small sections of Gennevilliers
as a residue for such waste in the 1860s; by 1872 fifty acres were
irrigated with sewage, and the number more than doubled by 1874. 5
It was at this time that both a governmental and a prefectural com-
mission proposed to irrigate practically all of Gennevilliers to ac-
commodate the increasing amount of waste from the capital. Out-
raged residents of Argenteuil fought vigorously against such plans.
Describing present conditions, one opponent noted: "During the
real heat of the summer, from sun up to sun down, a fetid stench
rises from these fields. Should our countryside, whose general ap-
pearance is so radiant, be a victim of this transformation, so little to
its advantage?"6

In fact, plans to transform Gennevilliers into the "cesspool" of
Paris advanced haltingly. Further, there is no evidence to suggest that
Monet, who was generally uninterested in municipal affairs, was
involved in the fierce lobbying that occurred at this time. Yet, the
disjunction between the calm, colorful vistas he painted that summer
and the depredations— both actual and potential— to the fields he
represented is overwhelming. His landscape is both idyll and fiction,
his vision both selective and simplifying. Scrupulously attentive to
certain details, Monet placed himself squarely inside the densely
colored field in this painting, at a point far closer to the trees than in
the other three versions. Further, although he was at pains to show
the freshly made haystacks in both the Boston and New York paint-
ings (figs. 84, 85), in this work the fields in the background are
treated so summarily that the stacks are discernible, if at all, only as
the merest dabs of flesh tone.7 In fact, their absence removes any
trace of the agrarian process from this painting; not only did Monet
resist the consequences of burgeoning modernization that would
eventually transform the fields of Gennevilliers altogether, but he
pared his image to reduce topography to the minimum. The artist's
concentration on means and not matter is the ultimate achievement

of this precocious summer landscape.

v v GBB

Claude Monet

french, 184o-i926

Camille Monet in the Garden at the House in

Argenteuil, 1876

oil on canvas, 3278 x 23w8 inches

In June 1874 Monet signed a six-and-a-half-year lease on a newly
built villa in Argenteuil almost next door to the property he had
been renting from Mine Aubry on the boulevard Saint-Denis.1 This
house, into which he and his family moved the following October,
was the property of a carpenter, Alexandre-Adonis Flament (1838-
1893)— "my landlord from Argenteuil to whom 1 still owe more
than I realize," as Monet wrote almost ten years later— who was to
become the first owner of Monet's monumental Dejeuner sur I'herbe.2
The Pavilion Flament appears in the final stages of construction in
the background of Camille in the Garden with Jean and His Nurse (fig.
76), its roof still unfinished, and it is just visible in the upper
left-hand corner of The Bench (p. 49). This house and its gardens, in
which Monet felt so much at home, provided the subject for seven of
his paintings in 1875 and ten the following year, making it the single
most important motif of Monet's final years in Argenteuil.3

CamUle Monet in the Garden at the House hi Argenteuil belongs to the
group of paintings done in the summer of 1876, and may have been
among those from June, when Monet was working on "a series of
lather interesting new things."4 Camille is shown standing in a long
summer's dress and hat next to two saplings and an imposing cluster
of hollyhocks. The "maison rose a volets verts," which Cezanne and
Victor Chocquet had visited in February of that year,5 dissolves in the
background under the intense sunlight of the summer's afternoon,
its spacious lawn just visible to the right, a patch of lime green
washed out by the sun. Monet's handling is at its most energized
here. The paint is applied in flickering stabs of color that establish a
constant Iv vibrating surface in which nothing is at rest. Characteris-
tic of his technique in the mid-seventies, no single element is particu-
larized or given preference: Monet's abbreviated and fleeting touch
pulsates evenly over the entire canvas.6 The simultaneous contrast of
green and red in the f lowerbeds creates a rhythm that is continued
into the peripheries: note the deft touches of red on Camille's face
and hat; the crimson lake that describes the upper branches of the
tree; the tou< hes of vermilion that pick out the top of the roof from
under the leaves and emphasize the rose bricks of the house below
the upper green shutter. Such proto-pointillist handling is again
apparent in the treatment of the sky behind the mass of foliage in the
upper left of the canvas: the sky literally penetrates through, with
dabs of blue and white paint placed on top of the greens throughout
the brandies and leaves.

It is possible to reconstruct Monet's garden from the group of
paintings done in 1875 and 187(1, in order to locate each view specif-
ic ally and to suggest, in turn, both the degree of control and selec -
tion in his vision. Monet's garden was a circular af fair, with a pathway
bordered on both sides by flowers and a large lawn in the middle
(fig. 87). At the far end of the garden were planted clusters of
striking ornamental f lowers— hollyhocks to the southwest, gladioli to
the southeast (f ig. 88)— and beyond them a patch of land thic k with
trees In tlx various views he painted, Monet's garden appears by
tin ns manicured and lush, domestic and savage.7 Indeed, the- same'

site can assume strikingly different aspects. In a Garden with Holly-
hocks (private collection, London), Monet posed Camille next to the
same hollyhocks as in this painting, but now she faces in the opposite
direction, looking up toward the house, lost in an overpowering,
almost threatening, vegetation, with no reassuring signs of the sub-
urban home at hand.8

In Gamille Monet in the Garden at the House in Argenteuil, it is Monet
who is looking up from the far end of the garden, his back to the
trees, the widening curve of the pathway disappearing off to the
right of the canvas. As comparison with a twentieth-century photo-
graph (fig. 89) confirms, he took great care with the two-story
house in the background, indicating the bright green shutters, the
corbels on the roof and the shadows they cast, and the veranda in
front of the house. Yet the expanse of garden is telescoped, Camille
appears waif like and diminutive beside the young trees, and the
most insistent element by far in the entire composition is the group
of hollyhocks surrounded by other flowers. It is this motif that offers
a clue to the significance of the painting.

Monet's garden paintings at Argenteuil have most recently been
interpreted as a retreat from the harsher realities of the town itself, a
return to nature, part of the artist's growing disaffection for modern
life in the suburbs.9 More generally, what more appropriate subject
for an Impressionist?— the effects of light, the array of color, the
motif observed and recorded in plein air. Yet, the bourgeois flower
garden was neither natural nor eternal: it was a relatively recent
phenomenon in the history of the French garden, and one whose
popularity among the well-to-do middle class can be documented to
the third quarter of the nineteenth century.10 Until this time, the
extensive private flower garden simply did not exist as a respectable
and self-sufficient entity, but by the 1860s the situation had
changed." Ernouf and Alphand's LArt des jardins, first published in
1868, proclaimed that in recent years a revolution in gardens had
taken place that was as momentous as Andre Lenotre's introduction
of the formal garden to seventeenth-century France, namely the
appearance of the private garden with an abundance of flowers.12

Thus, the flower garden of the Pavilion Flament— laid out, it may
be presumed, by Monet himself— offers another aspect of the artist's
impeccably bourgeois aspirations, his search for comfort and respect-
ability. In its own way, it, too, is a symbol of modernity and progress,
and therefore shares something with the Gare Saint-Lazare that
Monet would paint repetitively the following year. Furthermore,
Monet's garden at Argenteuil followed the latest fashion: his choice
of curving pathways and a circular lawn was in keeping with the
then-current preference for "les lignes et les surfaces courbes," a
reaction against symmetry that would be found excessive by the
1880s.13 Similarly, Monet's planting of large circular clusters (cor-
beilles) of high-standing flowers surrounded by flower beds of dis-
tinctive color was another convention that became firmly established
in the 1870s and would become orthodox by the following decade.
The cluster of hollyhocks that towers over Camille represents the
latest trend in garden design.14

In light of this, it is clear that Monet's garden paintings make
reference both to fashion and modernity, and are less "natural" than
they first appear. The contrast with the subjects Monet would paint
in Paris the following year becomes less marked, the break between
Argenteuil and Paris less dramatic. As Theodore Duret would ob-
serve in 1878, "Above all | Monet] is drawn towards nature when it is
embellished and towards urban scenes; from preference he paints
I lowery gardens, parks and groves."15

5 1

Claude Monet

FRENCH, 1840-1926

The Stroller (Suzanne Hoschede'), 1887
oil on canvas, 399/i6 x 273^ inches

e stroller shows Suzanne Hoschede (1866-1899) in the
meadows just south of Le Pressoir, Monet's home at Giverny. Suzanne
was the third daughter of Alice and Ernest Hoschede, and, after his
first wife, Camille, who died in 1879, the artist's preferred model.
Suzanne married the American Impressionist Theodore Butler
(1876-1937) — they had met skating at Giverny — on July 20, 1892,
four days after Monet and Alice Hoschede were officially married.
She died in February 1899 after five years of illness.

The painting belongs to the same campaign as two others, Suzanne
Reading and Blanche Painting (private collection, France) and
Suzanne Reading and Blanche Painting in the Meadows of Giverny
(fig. go), all three executed at the same site. Indeed, Suzanne's
costume here is identical to the one in the latter painting.1

Although not dated, The Stroller was probably painted in the sum-
mer of 1887, and Monet's intentions are laid bare in an unusually
revealing letter to Theodore Duret of August 13, 1887: "I am work-
ing like never before on a new endeavor, figures in plein air as I
understand them, painted like landscapes. This is an old dream of
mine, one that has always obsessed me and that I would like to
master once and for all. But it is so difficult! I am working very hard
at it, almost to the point of making myself ill."2

Monet's return to figure painting, which had started the year
before with Suzanne as The Woman with a Parasol (Musee d'Orsay,
Paris), would continue intermittently during the next four years with
paintings of the Hoschede daughters in boats and the Monet and
Hoschede children in the Giverny countryside.3 The mode was aban-
doned altogether in 1890, when Monet turned to series painting as a
way to resolve his dissatisfaction with the limitations of Impressionist
subject matter. But it is clear, both from his correspondence and his
itinerary of the following years, that it was in 1887 that Monet's
efforts in this new direction were at their most concentrated.4

In The Stroller, Suzanne is posed, almost like a photograph, in one
of the "vast and deep" meadows in front of Monet's garden, "where,"
wrote Octave Mirbeau, "rows of poplars, in the dusty mist of the

Normandy climate, form charming, dreamlike backdrops "5 Over

a gray-beige ground — visible only in the upper sections of her skirt —
the paint is applied in successive layers of varied, yet consistently
emphatic, brushwork. If the energetic, flickering dabs of blues,
greens, mauves, and pinks in the background anticipate Monet's
feathery handling in Bend in the Epte River near Giverny (Philadelphia
Museum of Art) of 1888, the tree trunks, grass, and figure of Su-
zanne herself are rendered in more deliberate strokes, whose heavi-
er rhythms anchor the pulsating chromatism of leaf and sky.

Despite the mosaic of brushstrokes and colors in the upper sec-
tions, Monet was less concerned here with recording the effects of

light and shadow on Suzanne than with fixing a presence that is at
once more permanent and more abstracted. Details of Suzanne's
expression and costume are suppressed— not, as in the paintings of
the seventies, to better evoke the fleeting instant, but, rather, to
simplify and render monumental. Yet, it is the balance of elements
here, both sitter and setting worked to the same degree of finish and
completion, that is central to the "new endeavor" he described to
Duret. Writing to the society portraitist Paul Helleu on August ig,
1887, Monet noted, "I have undertaken figures in the open air that
I would like to finish in my own way, like I finish a landscape."6 In
keeping with this, Monet refused to reduce landscape to mere back-
ground—something for which he would reproach Renoir in the early
nineties— while ensuring that his figures never overpowered or en-
tirely dominated the composition. Suzanne is painted with the same
touch and accent as the trees and grass, yet she remains a discrete
presence, never simply part of the landscape. It is this decorative
equilibrium, deceptively easy at first glance, that was achieved only
after much struggle on Monet's part.7

Although Monet would have been appalled at the suggestion, he
was significantly influenced at this time by the Broadway paintings
of a much younger American painter, John Singer Sargent (1856-
ig25).8 Sargent came to paint with Monet at Giverny in the summer
of 1887 — a visit in June is securely documented, another in August
is possible— and his Claude Monet Painting at the Edge of a Wood (fig.
gi) may well show the very site on which The Stroller was painted.9 As
John House has observed, Monet was intensely interested in Sar-
gent's experimentation with figure painting out of doors and would
have seen Sargent's most ambitious plein-air painting, Carnation, Lily,
Lily, Rose (The Tate Gallery, London), on display at the Royal Acade-
my, London, in May 1887, when Monet was visiting Whistler there.10
Although it is generally assumed that Sargent followed Monet in
these years— Monet noted to Alice Hoschede in April i88g that
"Sargent ... proceeds by imitating me" — Sargent's Impressionist
paintings consistently treat certain themes that appear only sporadi-
cally in Monet's canon between 1886 and i8go, where they are new
departures for Monet." The conclusion that there was mutual influ-
ence is unavoidable: more self-consciously posed, less interested in
atmospheric nuance, Sargent's Broadway paintings have the consis-
tency of touch and easy balance of sitter and setting that Monet
achieved in The Stroller.

The Stroller is furthermore suggestive of Monet's capacity to refine
his art in accordance with the latest developments in the painting of
the avant-garde. By the mid-i88os, reaction against Impressionism
had led Gauguin and Van Gogh, in particular, to experiment with
broadly drawn monumental figures of nonnaturalistic color, reso-
nant with symbolic meaning. The Stroller, with its unusually bold
contours and highly patterned surface, shares in the enterprise of a
younger generation in seeking to transform the fugitive effects of
nature into something immobile, abstracted, and decorative.12 In an
unexpected way, The Stroller is godmother to Van Gogh's Girl in White
(fig. g2), painted three years later.

Claude Monet

FRENCH, 1840-1926

The Path through the Irises, 1914-17
oil on canvas, 78v8 x 70^8 inches

In an interview given in 1918 and published posthumously,
Monet discussed the working method he had evolved, in the face of
impending blindness, to create the monumental series of decora-
tions on which he was occupied exclusively during the last decade of
his life. By now "insensitive" to the "finer shades of tonalities and
colors seen close up," he found, however, that his eyes did not "be-
tray" him when he stepped back and "took in the motif in large

masses " He continued: "I waited until the idea took shape, until

the arrangement and composition of the motifs had little by little
inscribed themselves on my brain."'

Indeed, The Path through the Irises — one of the many large-scale
canvases painted in plein air, and referred to by Monet as his
"sketches"— captures and fixes both the explosive color and joyous
virility of a flower that abounded on Monet's property at Giverny.
Despite the wildness of his handling— the flailing strokes of red,
blue, green, and violet pink dragged dry on dry — Monet's control of
the form and structure of his composition is unwavering. The path-
way curves in an arabesque and disappears to the upper left, with
irises in plentiful bloom on each side. Monet's bird's-eye perspective
and daring magnification of the flowers tend to diminish the path-
way; from contemporary photographs (fig. 93) it is clear that the
garden's paths were wider and the flowers less encroaching. Yet
Monet's commitment to the reality of his site is uncompromising.
The power of The Path through the Irises resides precisely in this
concentration on the physical, in Monet's rigorous attachment to
what Cezanne had called "that magnificent richness that animates
nature."2

However, the nature that Monet painted was by this time both
fabricated and subject to his organization and control. By the 1920s
the water garden at Giverny had become a celebrated and colorful
confection; since the turn of the century, it had been noted that the
aging Monet was never as happy as in the company of his small army
of "blue-bloused and sabotted gardeners," discussing with them the
mysteries of propagation, grafts, and color schemes.3

The iris was one of Monet's favorite flowers4— in "Le Clos Nor-
mand" they lined the pathways leading to his house— and the path-
way by the Japanese bridge was one of his favorite motifs. A group of
paintings done in 1900 shows clearly the path with irises as it ap-
proaches the bridge (fig. 94) and disappears behind it.5 It was a
segment of this view that Monet isolated in The Path through the Irises,
painted between 1914 and 1917, at a time when he must have had
great diff iculty focusing visually on the flowers themselves, although
the monumental sketch betrays none of this insufficiency. Charac-
teristic of his working method in these years, Monet painted a cluster
of similarly scaled compositions that share the same motif: for exam-
ple, Irises (fig. 95) and Irises on the Pathway (private collection,
France), in which the flowers themselves are not in bloom.6 He then

shifted his canvas a little more toward the lily pond itself, in the
exuberant and freely painted Iris (fig. 96), in which individual forms
are less clearly articulated. In this painting the pathway is cut off and
the blue of the pond intrudes to form a triangle of water reflecting in
the center of the composition. Iris was, in turn, the starting point for
two other large sketches of Irises by the Pond (fig. 97), where the
flowers have fully yielded to the ever-encroaching water.7

For Monet's friend, the critic Octave Mirbeau, irises evoked a
dusky sensuality.8 Although Monet himself often represented water
lilies (see Water Lilies, p. 60) as passive, supine elements, floating
calmly above the animated surfaces of the all-seeing pond, irises took
on an altogether more forceful, straining energy in his late work,
their wild leaves and pulsating blooms assuming a thrusting, almost
threatening, masculinity.

Monet's published correspondence for the period from 1914 to
1918 is also mute on the genesis of The Path through the Irises, al-
though we know that his obsession in the years after 1914 with the
panels he would bequeath to the French government led him to work
with great economy: practically every canvas he painted in the last
decade of his life related in some sense to the decorations in process.9
What, then, is the status of The Path through the Irises? Initially, this
painting and its cognates seem to bear little connection with any of
the great decorations. On the contrary, the ample and expansive
presentation of both the flowers and pathway in this group of paint-
ings effectively blocks out both sky and water — the two essential
elements of all the grand panels, whether retained or not. After a
visit to Giverny in 1920, the Due de Trevise characterized the sub-
ject of Monet's decorations as "the subtle play of air and water, under
the varied fire of the sun. The earth, being too material, is ex-
cluded "l0 None of the composite panels that have been recorded

includes the pathway and irises with such singularity of focus.

Yet, a relationship between The Path through the Irises and the
grand decorations, although attenuated, does exist. As previously
noted, once Monet had painted the irises and the curving pathway,
his vision moved inexorably toward the banks of the lily pond, until
the water came to occupy equal space in his compositions (see figs.
96, 97)." By anchoring the irises and the pathway to the edge of the
pond itself, Monet returned to a motif that had a well-defined place
within the schema of the water-lily decorations. The edge of the
riverbank with irises shrouded in the haze of dawn provides the
subject of the fourth and final panel for Morning (Musee de l'Oran-
gerie, Paris), installed in the first room of the Orangerie and painted
between 1921 and 1926, several years after The Path through the Irises
was painted. This section, painted on a squared canvas, is the ulti-
mate reprise of a motif that had once enjoyed independent status,
but that, in the visionary last works, could exist only in submission to
the water itself.12

Monet's determination to engage himself with motifs he could
hardly see succeeded through the intervention of memory and imag-
ination, as he himself divulged." In the end he was forced, almost in
spite of himself, to adopt a method of painting in which these forces
collaborated — the equation recalls Degas — and, indeed, The Path
through the Irises is a fine example of this reflexive manner of paint-
ing, recently described as Monet's "conceptualization on a grand
scale of the repertoire of gestures he had had at his command for so

Claude Monet

FRENCH, 1840-1926

Water Lilies, 1919

oil on canvas, x 783^ inches

W^th rare exceptions, Monet confined himself to painting
views of the water garden at Giverny during the last thirty years of
his life. As early as 1897, the year of his first Nympheas, he spoke of his
ambition to execute a monumental decorative cycle for a circular
room with motifs from the water garden as its subject.1 In 1902, he
increased the size of this garden by nearly four thousand square
meters, diverting the river Ru and constructing sluices to create an
enormous lily pond beyond the railroad tracks on his property.2
Thereafter, Monet produced an annual crop of canvases that fo-
cused more and more narrowly on discrete sections of the pond: on
the lilies themselves, but also on the reflections of sky, clouds, and
trees in the water. Obsessed by these studies, Monet undertook his
grand decorations at the outset of World War I. By October 1915, he
had built a third atelier on the northwest corner of his property,
large enough to accommodate twelve huge panels in sequence, and
during the next six years he worked relentlessly to bring this decora-
tive cycle into being.3 Twenty-two panels were officially dedicated in
two rooms at the Orangerie in May 1927, after lengthy and tortuous
negotiations with the French government. Monet, who had died the
previous December, never saw his project realized, although he left
strict instructions for its installation and display.4

With some embarrassment, Monet confessed to being totally ab-
sorbed in the decorations throughout the course of World War I.5
Despite cataracts and failing eyesight, he established a regular work-
ing method: during the spring and summer months, he would paint
what he called his "sketches" directly in front of the motif on can-
vases of considerable size. After October, he would return to the
panels themselves (too large to be moved from his third studio), with
which he was rarely satisfied. Contemporary accounts suggest that
he may have been working on as many as fifty full-scale panels at any
one time.6

From 1915 onward, all of Monet's energy was directed toward the
not vet commissioned decorative series, although Water Lilies and its
cognates fall into an independent group and stand somewhat apart.
On August 25, 1919, Monet informed Gaston and Joseph Bernheim-
|eune, dealers with whom he had done business since 1900, that he
was working "in full force," aided by the "splendid weather"; "I have
started on an entire series of landscapes, which quite thrills me and
which, I believe, may be of some interest to you. I dare not say that I
am pleased with the paintings, but I'm working on them passionately:
they provide some repose from my Decorations, which I've put to one
side mil il 1 he winter."7

( )n 0< tober 11, Monet told the Bernheim-Jeune brothers that the
change in weather had forced him to stop painting in plein air, and
thai lie looked forward to their visit.8 The next month, the dealers
purchased four large-scale Water Lilies, all signed and dated 1919,
which arc among the rare paintings that Monet released in the last
decade of his life.9 Given the artist's reluctance to part with his most
recent work, and his determination to keep his decorations intact,
the group of canvases to which Water Lilies belongs is something of
an anomaly in Monet's oeuvre: they are works painted specifically for
the market, and do not relate to a decorative panel then in process.

Although only four Water Lilies were sold in the fall of 1919, eleven
canvases are recorded in this series. All take the same segment of the
lily pond as their motif; all are painted on canvases measuring ap-
proximately three by six and a half feet;10 and all record shifting
moments of a summer's day, with the flowers more or less open, and
the reflections of the sky and clouds above more or less serene. Of
the four that Monet signed, three survive intact and one has been
divided in two; these paintings share a similar facture and are more
finished than the seven that Monet did not sign.11

Yet within the controlled and limited range Monet imposed, there
is an astonishing variety of tone, mood, and detail. In this Water
Lilies, the richly painted flowers are fully opened, but the sky is
overcast and cloudy. By contrast, in Water Lilies (fig. 98), one of the
paintings not sold to Bernheim-Jeune, Monet exalted in the splen-
dor of a summer's afternoon: the paint is applied more aggressively,
the reflections of the sky are painted deep blue, and the rolling
clouds are masses of pink.12

The group of Water Lilies would be Monet's last independent
series: thereafter, he would not permit himself the indulgence of
painting canvases on this scale unrelated to a specific decoration. In
February 1920, he confided to the dealer Rene Gimpel: "Last year I
tried to paint on small canvases, not very small ones, mind you;
impossible, I can't do it any more because I've got used to painting
broadly and with big brushes."13

Yet Monet's instinctive economy reasserted itself before long: con-
trary to his normal working method, he returned to this motif and,
presumably, to this group of sketches for the subject of one of the
large panels, nearly twenty feet long, that he painted early in 1921
(fig. 99). Conceived originally for the second room of the Orange-
rie, this was eventually eliminated from the four panels of similar
dimension that were finally installed in this gallery.14

In a review of Durand-Ruel's very successful exhibition of Monet's
first Nympheas series in May- June 1909, the critic Roger Marx
wrote that Monet "had reached the ultimate degree of abstraction
and imagination joined to the real" in these works.15 For Monet and
his contemporaries, the possibilities of this aesthetic equation were
accepted with more sympathy and insight than a strict modernist
interpretation of the artist's late work would allow.16 Degas was "in-
toxicated" by Monet's Nympheas; Gimpel compared his initial viewing
of the monumental decorative panels to being "present at one of the
first hours of the birth of the world"; Clemenceau was "bowled over"
by them and pushed Monet into creating his last great series for the
state.17 Furthermore, Monet's late decorative canvases were eagerly
sought both by dealers and collectors, who found themselves facing
the elderly artist's stubborn refusal to part with any of his last works.
With great reluctance, Monet sold one of the large decorations to
the Japanese collector Prince Matsukata for the astonishing sum of
200,000 francs in October 1921. 18

Perhaps even more surprising is the ease with which contempo-
raries "read" these expansive compositions. The effortless and poet-
ic legibility of Monet's late work is a further aspect that has been
somewhat obscured in recent literature.19 Arsene Alexandre, de-
scribing Water Lilies and its companion of the same title,20 then in the
collection of Henri de Canonne, wrote convincingly of the sequential
relationship between the two works, illustrative of "two moments in
the life of a water lily": "In the second work [the Annenberg Water
Lilies], we see three groups in full flower assert themselves, in their
golden discs encased in purple, against the cloudy waters that reflect
a turbulent sky. This painting overwhelms us with its life force, and
could well be called Maturity.'"21

Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec

FRENCH, 1864-1901

The Streetwalker (Casque d'Or), c. 1890-91
oil on cardboard, 2 5 '/a x 21 inches

Xortraiture is fundamental to the art of Toulouse-Lautrec.
From his most whimsical sketches to his elaborately prepared litho-
graphs, all his images are based on closely observed, carefully noted
figures with whom he had direct contact. Even in his most ambitious
canvases, such as Ball at the Moulin Rouge (fig. too), virtually all the
participants can be identified. And if this vast accrual of personages
has, for us in this century, merged into an anthology of all that was
typical of Paris at the turn of the century, it is only at the sad cost of
the merging of these assorted characters into typicalness, which was
never Lautrec's intent. For him the descriptive recording of the
individual was paramount, even given his great, innovative powers to
unite his surfaces through seemingly effortless patterns of plastic
lines. Some hundred years after their creation, Lautrec's posters
advertising the nightclubs of the Moulin Rouge immediately bring to
life La Goulue and Valentin le Desosse, Jean Avril in the Divan
Japonais, or Aristide Bruant in the Ambassadeurs. Many of these
people, along with others, appear and reappear in his works as they
did in Lautrec's late-night prowling in cafes and dance halls in Mont-
martre, a newly emerging quarter on the outskirts of Paris, after his
move there in 1882 (he would have a series of apartments and
studios there for the remainder of his life). Other people, such as the
subject of this picture, appear only once, although from the reports
of his friends — and from the pictures themselves— there is no doubt
that the distinction between a model and an intimate (however fleet-
ing the acquaintance) was never drawn. "He only made revealing
portraits of people he professed to like."1

In several cases, such as here, the facts surrounding the person
portrayed— for all the startling candor of the image— have been lost.
This disarmingly pert yet somehow vulnerable woman is known only
by the nickname she bore in honor of her pile of golden hair, swept
up on the top of her head to resemble a helmet, "La Casque d'Or." It
w is a style probably made fashionable among the demimonde of
Montmartre by the dancer La Goulue (Louise Weber) (fig. 101); we
know that wigs in vivid colors were produced in imitation of it and
worn bv dancers in clubs.2 Her profession is known from the title the
pi< lure has borne since it was first shown at Joyant's in 1914: "La
Pierreuse" (The Streetwalker). The belief that she was called Ame-
lie-I lie seems to be without substantial documentation.3

She was tremendously successful at her profession, first as a semi-
independent when her lover and protector (and probably pimp) was
the infamous police assassin and anarchist Liaboeuf, who was even-
tually guillotined.4 Her allure was such that she caused fights on the
streets among her pursuers, sometimes to the point of drawn knives
and pistols; one incident resulted in two deaths and a wounded
bystander. She became the submistress of a brothel on the rue des
Rosiers; thereafter, presumably in the late 1890s, her fame (and, one
sadly suspects, her fortunes) faded.

As engaging as these few biographical notes are in expanding our
romantic sense of Lautrec and his life in the underworld of Paris,

there is little in the picture itself to confirm a novelistic reading of it.
The Casque d'Or sits in a garden before a patch of saplings, a dirt
path extending up a hill on the right. Her legendary sensuality is
denied by the high-collared, buttoned-up brown coat she wears; only
the crest of her hair, beautifully worked in orange shadows and
lavender highlights, suggests her flamboyant reputation. It is pulled
down nearly over her strongly penciled eyebrows; is it indeed a wig?
Her limpid eyes are unblinking; her slightly crooked mouth is firmly
set. She has the strong presence of nearly all of Lautrec's portraits;
many have attempted to characterize the compelling sense of pres-
ence that she conveys. Fritz Novotny comes closest, drawing an anal-
ogy between Lautrec and Chekhov.5 In his view, whatever their roles
in the drama, the characters remain somehow outside, larger than
the painting or play itself, through the power of their intrinsic reality.
If the Casque d'Or moves us with her Piaf-like poignancy, tempered
by a determined tenacity, we must also draw back from her, because
of the consistent balance of sympathy and distance with which Lau-
trec portrayed all his characters. His great genius is that he never
merely characterized; he made his seemingly limitless fascination
with his characters our own.

The hair and features are carefully modeled in fine, delineated
strokes. The working of the surfaces releases outward into broader
and looser application, the lower section of the coat and sleeve
depending for definition almost entirely on the color of the board
support. The trees behind are treated with a broadness that suggests
Lautrec's knowledge of and admiration for the late works of Manet.
The wall at the top of the hill is described by a few white and
lavender strokes. The picture is structured with concentric degrees
of focus, all other elements taking a supporting role to the definition
of the face and head.

Although the work has been dated as late as c. i8g8,6 Lautrec's
close friend and eventually his dealer, Maurice Joyant, certainly is
correct in placing it at the beginning of the decade.7 A date of
c. 1890-91 was confirmed by Gale Barbara Murray in her thorough
work on revised dating.8 We know that as early as 1887,9 Lautrec
would often seat his subjects in the little and, by all evidence, rather
squalid and undernourished garden of his neighbor Pere Forest in
Montmartre. Several similar portraits of women show them seated
against the foliage in an assortment of portable chairs; the Casque
d'Or sits on a metal folding park seat. The most striking comparison
to this picture within the group is the portrait of Berthe La Sourde,
who, like the Casque d'Or, was a creature most likely encountered at
night.10 It is as though Lautrec wished to bring these women whom
he had first met in the gaslight of the cafes or brothels into the clear
light of day to better subject them to his penetrating observation.

He placed them in shadowless light and exposed their pallid com-
plexions against the verdant green of Pere Forest's feeble saplings.
The introduction of landscape was a passing thing for Lautrec, and
he used the garden only as a foil to remove his subjects from their
more natural setting of moving crowds. As he himself vigorously
noted: "Only the figure exists; landscape is and only should be an
accessory. The pure landscape painter is only a brute. Landscape can
only serve to allow us to better comprehend the figures. The same is
true of Millet, Renoir, Manet, and Whistler, and when the painters of
figures do landscapes, they treat them like a face. The landscapes of
Degas are remarkable; they are landscapes of a dream; those of
Carriere are like human masks! Monet has abandoned the figure
because he cannot do it!"" ,,_

Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec

french, 1864-i9oi
Henri-Gabriel Ibels, 1893

GOUACHE ON PAPER, 20'/2 X i$l/a INCHES

E jaunty and self-assured Henri Ibels is placed with direct
aplomb in the top third of a nearly empty space, his lively features
defined by a finely worked network of pale yellow highlights. The
natural color of the support creates the shadows. His hat, with its
upturned brim, and his lavish cravat are quickly worked in broad
washes of blue and purple. The same colors are applied in sweeping
strokes to define the oversized lapels and exaggerated shoulders of
his abundant overcoat. The head is set off by an aura of white paint,
which abruptly shifts to a sharp sea green around the face, giving the
flesh tones a particularly lurid pallor. It is a swift and amusing por-
trait of Lautrec's close friend that is completely in keeping with what
we know of this fellow-artist, whose ingenuity in their mutual artistic
affairs— and sometimes audacious manipulation of shared clients —
bonded their relationship, encouraged by their appetite for the
circus, musical cabarets, and dance halls of Montmartre. This image
is not without its darker side. The elevated pose used by Lautrec and
the quality of mischievous self-possession that plays across the face of
Ibels make this portrait Lautrec's Pierrot, the wily and infectiously
gay character in Watteau's painting at the Musee du Louvre (fig. 102),
who carries with him a cloud of vulnerability and melancholy: Theo-
phile Gautier's "tragique de blancheur."1

Henri Ibels (1867-1936) was one of the founding members of
the Nabis brotherhood, the small group of French artists that
included among its original members Bonnard and Vuillard.2
Their aesthetic formation developed out of Gauguin's circle at
Pont-Aven in the late 1880s, and they saw themselves as returning
painting and printmaking to a more flattened and stylized imagery
that would reintroduce both the social responsibility and the spiritu-

al elements they felt had been abandoned by the Impressionists.
Ibels himself was also associated with the anarchist movement and
often made satirical prints on the follies of the bourgeoisie and
depicted subjects drawn from the street life of the working classes
and the popular theater. He was known as "le Nabi journaliste," for
his illustrative lithographs. It was this interest that probably first
brought him into contact with Lautrec in the late 1880s.3 By the early
1890s they were constant companions. With his considerable skills
at promoting himself and his friends, Ibels got himself and Lautrec
the commission to illustrate a series of covers of sheet music of songs
then popular in the cabarets of Montmartre. They showed together
at Le Bare de Boutteville gallery in 1891, and it was through Ibels
that they shared the ambitious project to illustrate Georges Montor-
gueil's Le Cafe-Concert in 1893 (fig. 103). Siegfried Bing was per-
suaded by Ibels in 1895 to commission them to provide designs for
stained-glass windows (Lautrec's was executed by Tiffany in New
York) for his new gallery, L'Art Nouveau. Although they had no
further collaborations, their friendship continued until Lautrec's
death.

Despite their shared projects and mutual interests, they were artis-
tically quite different. Ibels worked within the range of illustrative
commentary and social criticism, often in the form of very telling
and humorous caricatures. Lautrec, while greatly interested in this
side of art, expanded far beyond the restraints of specific commen-
tary, just as his forms would never take the emphatic outlines and
abrupt silhouettes of his colleague.4 Yet, even with distinctions of
temperament and artistic rank, their friendship held true, Lautrec
reveling in Ibels's bravura manner and aggressive chicanery.

This sketch is nearly identical to a pen and ink drawing now at
Smith College (fig. 104), also done in preparation for a lithographic
portrait of Ibels that appeared in the journal La Plume on January 15,
1893. 5 The illustration accompanied an article on Ibels by the critic
Charles Saunier, who had the previous year noted the affinity be-
tween the two artists and praised both Lautrec and Ibels for their
acute realism. To judge by the configuration of the inscription on
the pen and ink drawing, which is identical to the journal illustration,
it, rather than this more ambitiously worked gouache, must have
served as a direct source for the published portrait.

J J R

Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec

FRENCH, 1864-1901

Woman before a Mirror , 1897

OIL ON BOARD, 24V2 X i8l/» INCHES

By the early 1890s, Lautrec became a steady visitor to the cele-
brated brothels of Paris on the rue des Moulins, the rue des Rosiers,
and the rue Richelieu, often taking a room in those luxurious pal-
aces of pleasure for several days, receiving his friends much as he
would in his apartment or studio. In 1892 he even designed, at the
behest of the proprietress, a room a la Pompadour for an establish-
ment on the rue d'Amboise. The indolent, cloistered lives of prosti-
tutes became the subject of some of his most powerful works, about
fifty paintings in all, as well as numerous drawings and prints, includ-
ing a complex set of lithographs done in series, Elles, of i8g6.

To what degree the intention of these sustained visits was, in part,
amorous is far from clear; Lautrec's sexuality continues to be as
much analyzed as it is undefined. But there can be no doubt that he
struck up an easy and confidential relationship with these women
who allowed him complete access to their twilight world of idle
anticipation, naive gaity, and physical intimacy, one to another. Pros-
titution as a subject for art was, of course, not novel in late nine-
teenth-century France. Much has been written about the precedents
for Lautrec's pictures in the literature of Baudelaire and Zola or,
more specifically, in the work of those artists he admired: Manet,
Constantin Guys and, above all, Degas. But if Manet's Olympia ( Musee
du Louvre, Paris) and Nana (fig. 105) were done, in part, to confront
the falseness of bourgeois standards, just as numerous artists in the
1890s would treat the theme with social and moralizing intent,
Lautrec, who drew upon this underworld more than perhaps any
other artist in the nineteenth century, consistently withheld judg-
ment, not even straying into the indulgent humor with which Degas
showed the madams and mademoiselles in his monotypes.

Here, a woman, nude except for her black knee stockings, stands
firmly planted in her room, gazing at herself in a full-length pier
glass. Her abundant red hair is knotted high on her head; the pallid
whiteness of her skin assures us that her hair is its natural color. She
holds a nightgown in her right hand; her peignoir with embroidered
cuffs is flung over the seat of an overstuffed neo-rococo love seat
with a carved wooden dolphin ornament. The walls are covered with
a rich scarlet cloth, the same material that seems to form a partial
baldachin over the head of the unmade bed. The room is carpeted
in a dense red and green woven fabric; its reflection in the mirror
catches the light across the room (out of our sight) to suggest a
window to the left.

It is a disarmingly still and neutral image. The woman's ample hips
and loosely muscled back may suggest a certain poignancy of age, yet
the image she contemplates in the mirror is f irm and youthful. Her
upright stance is that of a model holding a pose— and we know
Lautrec would hire women in the brothels for the day to pose for
him— with neither coyness nor posturing. Only the heap of bed-
< loihcs .11 the top ol the bed introduces an eroticall) suggestive
image,' and it is strange that many have seen bitterness or sharp

irony in this picture.2 The profession of the woman is clear; what
thoughts she may have about it are unaddressed. The only emotion
other than the artist's clear pleasure in witnessing this pale woman
with radiant hair, posed in a lushly appointed airless bedchamber, is
that distant and deeply affecting sense of sadness that pervades this
hermetic scene.

In his early brothel pictures and prints, Lautrec delighted in the
community of the women, and the majority of his works on this
theme are given over to multifigured images of them together, wait-
ing, sleeping, waking, or lovemaking. It is only in his later pictures,
which are many fewer in number and very different in character,
that the narrative elements fall away, and he depicts these women
quite apart from any specific professional context. In this sense,
Woman before a Mirror bears a close comparison to two other major
pictures from late in his career: Woman before a Bed, of 1899 (fig. 106)
and Woman Adjusting Her Nightgown, done in the year he died (fig.
107). In both cases, the figure is posed centrally in the space against
the effects of her room. These two later works may be compared to
the single nudes of Renoir (fig. 108), an artist with whom Lautrec
remained on good terms throughout the 1890s.3 However, the more
telling parallel, particularly for Woman before a Mirror, must be drawn
to Lautrec's most profound hero, Degas, whom Lautrec knew
through the composer and musician Desire Dihau and his family,
who lived near Lautrec in Montmartre. Lautrec fervently admired
the work of the older artist, and related to his friend and dealer
Maurice Joyant his immense pleasure when Degas visited his exhibi-
tion in 1893: Degas arrived late in the day, silently gazed carefully at
all the works while humming to himself, and only when halfway out
the door, turned to the young Lautrec and said, "I see you are one of
us."4 Lautrec's perceptive understanding of Degas's technique and
methods are no more apparent than here.

In this work of 1897, the vigorous graphic fluidity, the constantly
moving plastic lines, and the animated outlines of his earlier work
have now distilled into a coloristic unity and evenness of handling
that parallel his abandonment of the narrative, genre aspect of his
earlier treatment of brothel subjects. While he has given great atten-
tion to the beautifully modeled strokes that define the nude herself,
these now loosen more gently than before to define the room and
furnishings. The preeminence of the figure over her surroundings
that occurred in earlier pictures is now diminished; the physical
context is given greater weight, just as in Degas's painted and pastel
bathers of the late 1880s and 1890s (fig. 109). The broad strokes
that depict the mirrored image— the dark hatching across her re-
flected stomach and the blurring of the outline of her arm by a series
of noncontinuous lines, the absence of any edge to her mirrored
face, effacing the distinction between the artificial and real— directly
recall the works by the older artists in which the medium takes on an
independence from conventional modeling. The denseness of han-
dling and new manipulation of deep tones are unimaginable without
the precedence of Degas's pastels. The very darkness of this picture
—the sealed containment of the room in which stands this radiant
f igure who is, so strangely, neither beautiful nor ugly— is brought
about by Lautrec's understanding of the works of the older artists.
The nude before the mirror stands as one of Lautrec's most haunt-
ingly mute pictures, remarkable even among his abundant outpour-
ing of paintings on this theme. It is not surprising that some critics,
in their attempts to explain its effectiveness, have naturally turned
for comparison to the nudes of Goya and Rembrandt (fig. 110).

Georges Seurat

FRENCH, 1859-1891

Gray Weather, Grande Jatte, c. 1888
oil on canvas, 2^/4 x 34 inches

In 1890 Georges seurat showed ten pictures with the Societe des
Artistes Independants at the Cours la Reine of the Palais d'Industrie
in Paris;1 among them were two landscapes showing the banks of the
Seine painted during the previous two or three years, which the
critic Jules Christophe selected for particular note: "The effect is
calm and gentle, with a harmonious placement of grays; the peaceful
tonalities of the two studies of the Grande Jatte are delightful."2 In
his review Georges Lecomte stated that "The Grande Jatte, Gray
Weather, proves that even in the torpor of an opaque sky, the sun still
acts with a muffled and latent diffusion of light."3 This praise would
not have been particularly pleasing to an artist who had earlier
responded indignantly to a similar subjective appraisal of his work:
"Certain critics see poetry in what I have done. No, I apply my
method and that is all there is to it."4 By his own description, Seurat
set out to discipline the creation of paintings through the systematic
application of carefully calculated formulas concerning color, com-
position, and line, which superseded those works of the older gener-
ation of Impressionists — Zola's "Nature seen through tempera-
ment."5 During the second half of the 1880s he laid a foundation for
a new, objective mission for the many artists of his own generation
who were drawn to his methods. Yet, for all the rigor of intention
and application of his theories, the outcome always seemed to com-
prise a balance of systematic application and poetic expression. This
duality is no more apparent than in the vigorously analytical yet
subtly evocative painting Gray Weather, Grande Jatte.

The site is one of the best known in nineteenth-century French
painting: the island of the Grande Jatte. Stretching for over one mile
in the river Seine, just northwest of Paris, this narrow strip of land
(six hundred feet at its widest), opposite factories and the dense
working-class neighborhoods of Clichy and Valois-Perret on the right
bank, with the more arboreal and prosperous middle-class suburbs
of Courbevoie and Asnieres to the north, was a favorite outing place
for Parisians by the 1880s. Thanks to the easily available train
service from the Gare Saint-Lazare, they came in mobs on summer

Sundays to swim, fish, boat, or to take the air with their pets. The
Grande Jatte was one of the favorite haunts of Seurat and his friends;
boys swimming along the banks at Asnieres became the subject of his
first ambitious painting, The Bathing Place (Asnieres) of 1884 (fig. 111).
Two years later at the eighth, and last, Impressionist exhibition, he
showed Sunday Afternoon: Island of the Grande Jatte, 1886 (fig. 112), the
celebrated picture resulting from a long gestation that included
numerous drawings and oil sketches and that established his reputa-
tion among the avant-garde, permanently dividing the artists of the
older generation of Impressionists, who had shown together since
1874. 6 Both of these grand pictures are monumental experiments in
the long French tradition of depicting figures in a landscape, and
their complexity is immense. However, particularly in the latter part
of the decade, Seurat painted landscapes on a more modest scale, on
summer outings to the French towns on the Channel and, on at least
three occasions, when revisiting the site of his great achievement of
1886. He returned to nature, as he noted, to "wash" the light of his
Parisian studio from his eyes, and "to transcribe most exactly the
vivid outdoor clarity in all its nuances."7 It was Seurat's practice to
work in plein air only for drawings and small oil sketches; his final
paintings were done in his studio, which was often lit by gaslight.

This picture shows a dull, overcast summer's day on the Grande
Jatte, devoid of the rowers, boaters, and fun seekers who populate
the 1886 picture, which contains some forty figures. The idle boats
are tied up to the mooring posts driven into the shallows along the
bank: a little sailboat on the far left; two punts with pennants (per-
haps from their rowing clubs) fluttering from the mooring poles;
and a steam-powered craft firmly secured between two other poles,
its dinghy tied up separately. As large as the latter boat seems in this
context, it is probably just a small pleasure craft of the kind that
moves gaily downriver in the 1886 painting, its guide sail, which
goes up over the metal arch on the stern, furled away.

The view across the gently flowing river to the suburb of Courbe-
voie behind a concrete embankment is framed by the trees of the
island. A path worn on the grass moves strongly across the fore-
ground, the boldness of its diagonal somewhat dissipated as it weaves
in and through the little grove of trees on the left. The surface of the
painting is densely, but not evenly, covered by a series of small brush-
strokes applied with great deliberation. Directly placed pure colors
alternate within each area of definition: orange/green, blue/yellow,
and white/gray. A border of alternating strokes of red and blue
surrounds the entire canvas. The effect is at once freshly panoramic

and spatially flattened. As Robert Goldwater noted, the diagonal
placement of the tree trunks is balanced by the visual union of the
foliage to the surface of the picture plane, just as the strong angle of
the path is spatially thwarted by the even horizon of the bank
beyond.8

The painter Charles Angrand (1854-1926) described his working
visits to the Grande Jatte with Seurat in 1885 or 1886: "The luxuri-
ous summer grasses along the bank had reached such a height that it
obscured a boat, just along the bank, which he wished to depict. To
avoid any trouble, I did him the service of cutting away the grass;
afterwards he eliminated the boat from his picture. He was no slave
to nature, oh, no! But he was respectful of it, not imaginative. His
greatest attention was given to the tonalities, the colors and their
interaction."9 The picture Seurat was painting is not the one shown
here, but Angrand's description of Seurat's attitudes applies. As ab-
stract as his theories about the making of a picture may have been,
the subject and the place were central issues, and questions of poetic
mood and response to specific locations were, particularly in the
independent landscapes, critical aspects of his work. It is unusual for
Seurat, who was very prudent about his titles, to have given a descrip-
tive title to this painting: "Gray Weather." At least three of his harbor
pictures bear the notation "Evening," along with the name of the
town in which they were painted, but never was he as specific in
noting the climatic nature of the moment as he was here.10 In this he
was drawing close to the intention — at least in title — of the Impres-
sionists, particularly Monet, whose declared purpose was to capture
specific climatic effects. Given Seurat's relationship to the older gen-
eration of Impressionists and his supposed dependency on their
attitudes and style — a link that has been seriously questioned in
recent criticism"— this is an idea worth testing. Is this, indeed, a
closely witnessed record of a temporal and climatic condition in
nature?

Felix Feneon, the critic and friend of Seurat, was among the first
to note that one of the grave dangers of Divisionist painting was that,
through its increasing refinement of the applied, separate strokes
that characterize its practice, the interaction of colors tended to
cancel one another out, creating a somewhat dulled coloristic effect
that may have been just the opposite from the vibrancy intended.
That is certainly not the case here, where despite the intensity and
degree of density of color strokes, the relationship is so refined and
delicately balanced that the overall muted effect is as intended.12
This phenomenon proved a danger only for those followers of Seur-
at who practiced his Divisionist techniques with less rigor and strong-

mindedness. The subtlety and degree of forethought exercised here
argue for a completely calculated effect, an effect that is described by
the title. The strokes, for example, are not applied with an even
denseness. They vary markedly in their thickness and degree of
color contrast from one zone of the picture to another, just as the
priming layer is not applied evenly but, rather, with considerable
forethought to align with the bands of pattern within the picture:
the lighter path, the water, and the sky are painted directly on
unprimed canvas, whereas a white underpainting shows in spaces
between the strokes in darker areas, to further enhance the contrast-
ed color strokes and create illusionist space. The final effect is one of
great formal lucidity and absoluteness, yet it has a definite sense of
the place and the atmosphere in which it was witnessed. The subjec-
tive element is in enchanting accord with the objective calculations of
its realization; the "scientific" and the "poetic" duality is resolved on
the highest possible aesthetic and experimental plane.13

The border is painted, allowing the picture to distance itself from
its original wooden frame, taking the shadow of the frame away
from the image with an aura of gentle vitality. The painted border
has been frequently discussed and its originality questioned on the
assumption that Seurat returned to this picture at some later date to
adjust its surround, as he was known to have done in other cases.14
However, careful observation of the edge of the picture suggests that
this is not the case. The image of the landscape is carefully brought
up to a fine edge of exposed, ungrounded canvas well within the
perimeter of the outer edge of the canvas. This dark razor line is
particularly evident in the highlight of the tree trunk to the right,
which plays so effectively in and out of the third dimension, in
contrast to the dark border just beyond— with the blue and red
alterations applied on the same exposed canvas with great method.

The exact date of this painting remains unclear. It was first shown
in the sixth exhibition of Les Vingt in Brussels in February 1889 and
has often been ascribed to the previous year, although other works
probably dating from 1886-87, including the Bridge at Courbevoie
(fig. 113), which bears certain comparisons to it, were also shown
there for the first time. Camille Pissarro (1831-1903), on a visit to
Seurat's studio in 1887, noted that Seurat was just beginning to
experiment with both contained painted borders and frames paint-
ed with Divisionist strokes, explaining that "the picture is not at all
the same with white or anything else around it. One has positively no
idea of the sun or of grey weather except through this indispensable
complement. I am going to try it out myself."15 The inclusion of the
painted bolder here suggests, therefore, a date of 1887 or later,

rather than 1886 {Gray Weather, Grande Jatte was not shown in Paris
by Seurat in the exhibition of 1887.) If one follows the argument
that Seurat's overall stylistic development proceeded toward a more
abstracted, patterned series of compositions in the latter 1880s, cul-
minating in the complex, frontal geometry of Parade (Musee du
Louvre, Paris) in 1890, then Gray Weather, Grande Jatte should cer-
tainly fall slightly later than either ihe Bridge at Courbevoie (fig. 113) or
another depiction of the same site, The Banks of the Seine: Grande Jatte
(fig. 114), neither of which has a painted border. Further, the poetic
aspect of Gray Weather, Grande Jatte, both in the evocation of atmo-
spheric effects and the slightly melancholy mood it expresses in its
grayed, depopulated scene, suggests an emotional evolution beyond
the two other pictures.

The early history of the picture is worthy of note. It first belonged
to Seurat's friend Alexandre Seon (1855-1917), whom he met as a
fellow-student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1878 or 1879,
where they studied with Henri Lehmann (1814-1882). Seon followed
a less progressive course than Seurat; he became a successful painter
and illustrator, somewhat affected by Seurat and his friends, but
remaining more within the limited conventions of the Salon. Their

friendship seems to have renewed in the late 1880s, just as Seurat
was in a state of disillusionment at the hostile reaction to Sunday
Afternoon: Island of the Grande Jatte from some of the Impressionists
(particularly Monet and Renoir) and progressively more wary of the
adaptation of his methods by his circle of followers. Given the relative
prosperity of his family, Seurat had no financial need to sell his
works, and it is known that he sometimes gave even important can-
vases to his friends. Seon may have come to this picture in this
fashion. For example, in the distribution of Seurat's estate, he was
the recipient of a small oil sketch of the Grande Jatte, which Seurat's
mother (although probably not his wife, whom he kept secret from
all his family and friends until literally the day of his fatal illness) had
been encouraged to give to him by the theorist Felix Feneon and the
painters Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce.16 By the 1920s, the pic-
ture had come into the collection of the New York lawyer John
Quinn, one of the most active and enlightened collectors of progres-
sive painting.17 It joined one of the single most important gatherings
of the artist's works ever accrued, ten in all, including Seurat's final
masterpiece, The Circus, which Quinn bequeathed to the Musee du
Louvre in Paris.

JJR

Paul Cezanne

FRENCH, 1839-1906

Portrait of Uncle Dominique as a Monk, c. 1866
oil on canvas, 2313/i6 x 21v16 inches

C*ourbet IS becoming classical. He has painted splendid things,
but next to Manet he is traditional, and Manet next to Cezanne will

become so in turn Let's only trust ourselves, build, paint with

loaded brushes, and dance on the belly of the terrified bourgeois.

Our turn will come, too Work, my dear fellow, be brave, heavy

pigment, the right tonalities, and we'll bring about the triumph of
our way of seeing!"1 So wrote Cezanne's friend the painter Antoine
Guillemet (1843-1918) in a letter of September 1866 to a colleague
from the Academie Suisse, Francisco Oiler, who had briefly returned
to his native Puerto Rico. The letter was truly prophetic of the
pictures Guillemet would witness being done when he joined Ce-
zanne in Aix the following month. At the age of twenty-seven,
Cezanne had brought his art to a point that, as Lawrence Cowing has
recently noted, "we may if we wish call the beginning of modern
an."2 The Portrait of Uncle Dominique as a Monk, painted in the
company of Guillemet that autumn, is one of the pivotal master-
pieces marking Cezanne's first realization of his tremendously vigor-
ous powers of innovation.

Cezanne's early development was fraught with passionate explora-
tion for a means of realizing the ambitions he had discussed so
earnestly with his childhood intimate in Aix, Emile Zola. Like Guille-
met, Cezanne and Zola were determined to make their marks; Ce-
zanne's means of doing this in the late 1850s and early 1860s was the
execution of a group of intensely worked landscapes and figure
subjects, often charged with a macabre obsession with violence and
intense sexuality During the summer of 1866 — perhaps first in a
landscape of the Seine at Bennecourt— he began experimenting with
paintings in which he abandoned the brush altogether, working, as
Com bet had in his landscapes and flower pictures (although never
with figures), exclusively with a palette knife. This method, due to
the necessity oi swift execution and density of paint, helped him
achieve .1 direc tness of execution and boldness of image that he
would characterize some thirty years later in reviewing his canvases

of that time as une couillarde: literally, "ballsy." This vividly coarse
word aptly summarizes the "ostentatious virility [that] suited the
crudity of the attack with which the palette-knife expressed the
indispensable force of temperament for a few months in 1866."3

The paint is literally troweled over a partial underpainting of olive
gray, which itself has been swiftly pulled over the coarse, unprimed
canvas. The density of the paint is such that there is a sculptural
relief to the surface: "the painting of a mason."4 Individual strokes do
not blend into one another but, rather, were made in an immediate
and direct manner, the colors having been mixed on the blade itself,
then flowed onto the surface. For the simplicity of the palette — even
the laid background is made up of black, white, and just a little
blue— the range of tonality is remarkable. The intense contrast of
white and red in the face stands apart from the deep black of the
sitter's hair and beard, which are enveloped by the pure white cowl.
Beneath the blue ribbon that holds the more thinly painted, black
wooden cross, the whites of the costume are blended with yellow and
threads of blue. The massive hands are done in less contrasted tones
than is the face, the strokes more elongated and sustained than the
staccato attack of the knife that defines the features. The immediacy
of the overall image is realized in a centrifugal wave of coloristic and
gestural rhythms progressively easing in intensity and contrast from
the face outward to the edge of the canvas, where the blade glides off
the surface, leaving the olive underpainting exposed in places. At no
time previously was Cezanne so completely in command of his execu-
tion, nor was he, until this point, able to achieve a work of such force
and vigor.

The sitter is the artist's maternal uncle, Dominique Aubert. Dur-
ing the autumn of 1866, and perhaps into the following January,
Cezanne did nine portraits of him in various guises.5 They all seem
to have been done at Cezanne's father's house outside Aix, Jas de
Bouffan, as reported by Antony Valabregue, who himself had earlier
sat for Cezanne: "Fortunately I only posed for it one day. The uncle is
more often the model. Every afternoon there appears a portrait of
him, while Guillemet belabors it with terrible jokes."6 It is altogether
a remarkable group of works, for which t he uncle must have sat with
considerable patience.

Seven of the portraits show him only from the chest up. In an-
other, The Advocate (fig. 115), approximately the same size as this
painting, he gestures rhetorically, suggesting, as does his costume, his
profession as a lawyer. Regardless of their sizes, all of his portraits are
done with equal vigor of handling, although it could be argued that

none reaches the density of application of this picture or — particu-
larly through the gesture of the crossed arms — its massive intensity.
Part of this may be due to the state of preservation of the present
picture, in which the height of the impasto has survived to a remark-
able degree.

To what extent this painting is, in any conventional way, a portrait
has long been a matter of discussion. Certainly, given the critical role
of the picture in the stylistic evolution of Cezanne's work, much more
discussion has been devoted to it as a painting than to its subject. Yet
the ferocious presence of the figure brings one back to some attempt
to characterize him as a man, a speculation thwarted by the absence
of any real information about him. It has often been said that his
patience, particularly to the point of posing in various guises, must
have been great and his nature pliant. However, it is only here that
he is cast in an assumed role, that of a Dominican monk. Whether
the white habit was put on simply to accommodate his nephew's
desire to paint large areas of white or had some further meaning is
also unclear.

It has been noted that during the generation of Cezanne's father, a
staunch republican who, like his son, scorned the politics of the
Second Empire, the masterful orator and essayist Jean-Baptiste-
Henri Lacordaire (1802-1861) was one of the dominant forces in
French liberal politics.7 Through his sermons at Notre Dame, Paris,
and his editorship of the newspaper L'Avenir, Lacordaire advocated
programs of radical social reform through a revival of moral princi-
ples. In 1838, while in Rome, he reestablished the Dominican order
—the "watchdogs of Christ"— and brought the order back with him
in 1840 to France, where he met with only limited success, although
he ever afterward called himself a monk.8 By the mid-i86os an
association with Lacordaire carried with it an almost nostalgic iden-
tification with lost causes; certainly, the expressive determination
and staunchness of Uncle Dominique as portrayed here are in keep-
ing with the character of the historical Dominican. However, we
know too little about Dominique Aubert's religious convictions— or
those of the young Cezanne, who was to take on the piety of his
mother and sister Rose later in life but who, at this point, was proba-
bly more affected by his father's agnosticism — to draw a firm conclu-

sion. It must also be realized that the white habit may simply be a
verbal pun— Dominique/Dominican— an association Cezanne used
on other occasions.9 Yet, even in comparison with all the other
portraits of Dominique Aubert, there is in this picture— in the char-
acterization as well as in the costume— a particular force of physical
presence that tempts one to extend some type of interpretation
beyond the immediate identity of the man, especially in view of the
degree to which narrative and literary associations figured in Ce-
zanne's work during the remainder of the decade.

Whatever its meaning— should there be any — the Portrait of Uncle
Dominique as a Monk would continue to provide Cezanne with a kind
of figurative resource well after he had abandoned direct palette-
knife painting. By the following year, the palette knife would play less
and less of a part in his technique, as would an interest in coarse,
heavy, worked impasto and a palpable weight of paint. However, the
density of surface achieved so swiftly in the autumn of 1866 would
continue, albeit with progressively slower and more blended applica-
tion, through the 1870s. The unity he achieved here between the
physical surface and the control of spatial realization would sustain
him throughout his life. And the pose itself, a stolid male figure with
his arms resolutely folded over his chest, would recur repeatedly,
particularly in the 1890s (see fig. 116).

As Guillemet had noted to Oiler, their gods were Courbet and
Manet, the figures thev had set out to challenge. At this critical point
in his art, it would almost seem that Cezanne was addressing his debt
to both in equal measure, while at the same time introducing a kind
of innovation from which he, and much of the course of later art,
would never turn back. The Courbet influence is most apparent:
swift use of the palette knife to apply brilliantly contrasted black and
white, interlaced with flashes of intense color. However, Courbet's
surfaces, even in his most broadly applied palette-knife pictures,
never build to this degree of density, nor did he ever abandon chiar-
oscuro to the extent Cezanne had here. For Courbet, the contrast of
sharply juxtaposed lights and darks was always to a spatial end, hence
the dramatic virility and force of his paintings in this manner. Ce-
zanne's blacks— even those that edge Dominique's hands and cuffs-
are in plane with the whites and blues and are not passively sub-

merged into shadows, as had been the practice to this point in the
history of art. The figure is, in the intensity of its creation, literally
wrought into space by the density of the paint application; "Cezanne
was intensifying Courbet's least acceptable peculiarity, making it ob-
trusive, systematic and obsessional."10

The debt to Manet is less obvious, yet the very notion of posing a
friend in costume may have derived from Manet, as in such pictures
as the Bon Bock (fig. 117), in which the figure is cast in a nearly
theatrical role. And, perhaps more profoundly in comparison with
the same picture, Cezanne's interest in a completely controlled tonal
harmony through an animation of applied brushstrokes may owe
much to Manet, as radically different in temperament as the two
artists were and as contrasting as their two achievements may be.

The early works such as the Portrait of Uncle Dominique as a Monk
were, ironically, among the last to be seriously appreciated. In their
seemingly obsessive vigor of creation and implicit violence, they have
often been placed into a vague category of Cezanne-before-he-be-
comes-Cezanne— that is, before the calming influence of Camille
Pissarro (1831-1903) at Pontoise in the early 1870s and Cezanne's
evolution into a more studied, analytical painter. (Yet it was Pissarro
who first recognized the innovative genius of the young painter and
saw the accomplishment in the pictures of the later 1860s.) At best, it
was only recently that works such as this have been understood both
for their intrinsic worth, as products of a fully mature and launched
artist, and for their place in his later development. This rather
abrupt development in his career has, in turn, done much to mis-
guide our understanding of the often implicitly narrative aspects, as

well as the more impassioned, less cerebral elements, of his later art,
which more formal interpretations have often set aside. The confu-
sion about early Cezanne, which continued into this century, is illus-
trated by the history of the Portrait of Uncle Dominique as a Monk. It
was bought by the Frick Collection in 1940 and perceptively discussed
in a news release prepared by the collection." Noted in a 1947 hand-
book of the collection, it was contrasted with the later Chestnut Trees
at fas de Bouffan (The Minneapolis Institute of Arts), as a work that
"might be by a different hand" and that "recalls the romantic period
of Cezanne's youth"12 (Cezanne was twenty-seven years old at the
time he painted it)— only to be sold in 1949.13

For all the swiftness of execution and barely disguised passion of
this painting, it also has a formal resolution and control, the surface
vitality completely in balance with the spatial effect, and stands
completely on a par with the achievements of the following four
decades. Furthermore, the picture seems to have pleased the sitter
(one hopes out of more than pure sentiment), who kept this one
throughout his lifetime, Hugo Perls buying it from his estate outside
Aix. As late as 1903, with the death sale of Emile Zola, at which
several pictures of this period were sold, the admittedly highly reac-
tionary critic Henri Rochefort, in an article on the "love of Ugliness,"
could declare such pictures mere "daubs," an affront to the tradi-
tions of Rembrandt, Velazquez, Rubens, and Coya.14 Ironically, such
sarcasm can be credited with some insight if turned into the positive:
the Portrait of Uncle Dominique as a Monk now rests comfortably with-
in the grand artistic lineage as outlined by Rochefort.

.J J R

Paul Cezanne

FRENCH, 1839-1906

Dish of Apples, 1875-77

oil on canvas, l8v8 x 213/4 inches

By the early 1870s, Cezanne had assimilated many of the spatial
concerns and techniques of the Impressionists, with whom he would
show in their first exhibition in 1874. Under the influence of Ca-
mille Pissarro (1831-1903), whom he joined in Pontoise in 1872, the
impassioned and swiftly worked surfaces of his earlier pictures sub-
sided (see Portrait of Uncle Dominique as a Monk, p. 73) for the calmer,
more analytical methods that he would apply throughout the rest of
his life. At no point, however, did he completely adopt the concerns
of Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, or Armand Guillaumin (1841-1927).
Transient natural effects and the textures of objects in light were for
him too insubstantial to be proper subjects of art. His goal was the
"making out of impressionism something solid and durable like the
art of museums."1 This desire to establish something permanent is
nowhere more apparent than in the series of still lifes he painted
during the second half of the 1870s. Dish of Apples is one of his most
complex and monumental resolutions to this end.

A plate filled with apples sits just at the edge of a heavy wooden
bureau with an overhanging top. To the right is a brightly decorated
porcelain sugar bowl and a lone green apple. These objects are
placed on a white linen cloth, its density evidenced by the stiffness
with which it mounds up behind the apples. A gaily ornamented
object hangs on the wall behind the bureau. To the right appears the
banded edge of what appears to be a tapestry. The only perspectival
elements are the overhanging top of the bureau and a small wedge of
wooden surface behind the cloth at the right. The monumental
effect of objects rendered in space depends almost entirely on the
massive weight of the modeled apples, the forceful curve of the plate,
the turned sugar bowl, and the modeling of the napkin, in which
conventional chiaroscuro plays a very limited role, the absence of
black being marked. All who have written about this still life have
commented on its profound gravity and weightiness, that "solemn
quality of truth" mentioned by Georges Riviere.2

The objects in the foreground are rendered with a dense applica-
tion of lean paint to create a surface like richly embossed leather.
The napkin, which in profile so disconcertingly recalls that of Mont
Sainte-Victoire, is more fluidly handled, although still with a build-
up of numerous layers. In contrast to the deliberate and angular
constructivist strokes of the foreground elements, the background is
more lightly rendered, with a thinness of paint that allows for quick
ornamental touches. These same, looser and more broadly scaled
strokes continue on both sides in the blue field, the whole back-
ground taking on an animated flatness that pushes the grandly
modeled foreground elements even more forcedly into space.

The complexity of color applied is at one with the spatial manipu-
lation. The light falling on the foreground elements brings the

colors to their full brilliance. Each element of the palette recurs in
the background, albeit in more subdued tones: moss green, light
blue, and ocher only lightly interlocked with the sharper yellows,
reds, and oranges that are given fuller play in the foreground. The
picture is a tonal harmonization of much greater range and com-
plexity than the initial impression of solidity suggests. This very
complexity— in terms of composition, textural variety of paint han-
dling, and diversity of palette— makes the picture difficult to place in
the artist's notoriously elusive chronology.

The blue decorative object, with curving architectural ornaments
and a portrait medallion flanked by leaves and flowers, was often
described in the literature as some type of tapestry or cloth hanging.
However, in i960, Robert Ratcliffe identified the object as the lower
part of one section of a large, six-panel, double-sided decorative
screen (fig. 118)3 that is perhaps Cezanne's earliest recorded painting.
The artist, late in his life, noted he had painted the screen in
1859-60 for his father's workroom, reportedly assisted by Emile
Zola, carrying out the project in a moment of very high spirits.4 On
the large screen he and Zola painted a somewhat comic Arcadian
scene in the manner of Lancret. It remained intact long after Ce-
zanne's death; the Arcadian scene5 and the ornamental panels, now
mounted flat, have survived. He often quoted the screen in the
background of his still lifes; sometimes as here in the form of a flat,
isolated detail, and sometimes folded. Given its scale and the pres-
ence here of the lowest band of ornament, he must have dismantled
it and hung it on the wall so that its bottom would just clear the Louis
XVI commode before it. The sugar bowl, another recurring prop in
the small repertory of objects Cezanne would use in Aix over a long
time period, appears to be used for the first time here.

All of these facts securely place the picture in Aix, where Cezanne
spent much of 1876 and all of 1878. But exactly when was it painted?
The loose and varied handling of the background is in contrast to
the almost tensely labored quality of his still lifes of the mid-i87os,
when his working of surfaces was most analytical, with clearly direc-
tional strokes and an almost mathematical network of cross-hatched
field color. However, the absolute closing of the foreground with
little escape into space fits well within this time period.6

Often overlooked in discussions of Cezanne's work is the range of
his expressive temperament. In Dish of Apples, a quality of formal
resolution — the grandeur of the foreground elements foretelling the
still lifes of much greater scale that would follow in the 1880s— is
balanced by the gaily painted sugar pot and the rococo screen. In an
eighteenth-century reference the screen is treated with a curvaceous
levity, introducing a counterclassical baroque dimension. It was a
moment, with the introduction of one of the most relaxed produc-
tions of his early youth, in which he could, with tremendous mastery
and considerable expressive range, combine gaiety with solemnity,
analytical definition with decorative painting, and monumental res-
olution with beautifully maintained, flat, stage-set description.

JJR

Paul Cezanne

FRENCH, 1839-1906

The Bathers, c. 1888
watercolor and pencil on paper,

47/3 X 77/3 INCHES

Six NUDE figures lounge along the bank of a river. Three— the
two actually in the water and the man about to dive from the oppo-
site shore— seem to be observed with great candor. The others are
more formally posed, their postures and gestures recalling the draw-
ings after studio models, old master drawings, and sculpture in the
Musee du Louvre that filled Cezanne's sketchbooks. The relief-like
space aligns the figures into a shallow frieze, which is subtly modulat-
ed, first by a series of soft pencil lines that defines all the elements
and then is reinforced by intense blue watercolor lines laid on with
the same sensuous vitality as the pencil sketch. Broad slashes of blue,
extended to thinned washes in the water and the sky, are inter-
spersed with quick strokes of yellow and green in the foliage. It is an
image of wonderful spontaneity and freshness, an evocation of a
pastoral Arcadia, which recalls the summer outings that Cezanne
took with his boyhood friends Emile Zola and Baptistin Bailie into
the countryside around Aix. And yet for all its immediacy, it is a
composition that bears a complex relationship to other small works
that repeat, always with variations, elements appearing here, and
stands — with some two hundred other works by Cezanne on the
subject of bathing nudes— as one of the most enigmatic themes of his
career.

This watercolor almost certainly was detached from one of the
sketchbooks that Cezanne carried with him to record observations
about the objective world, in which he also developed his thoughts on
the bather subjects, a theme that he well understood was one of the
most elevated in the history of French painting and that throughout
his career he would transform and bring honorably into the twen-
tieth century. A sheet in pencil and watercolor of similar dimensions
(fig. 119) has the same figurative elements, albeit rearranged some-
what within the composition, and at least three oil paintings contain
similar figures (see figs. 120, 121). 1 Neither watercolor seems, howev-
er, to be a study, in the conventional sense, for any of the paintings.
When viewed within the larger context of other variations on the
theme, clearly each work— as interdependent as each may be in

adapting elements from one to the other — retains complete indepen-
dence, and it is impossible either to trace precisely a development in
them as a group or to establish a priority of borrowing within them.

The meaning of these figures and the bather subjects in general
has prompted much speculation within Cezanne scholarship. Unlike
his landscapes, still lifes, and studies of posed (and clothed) models
after the late 1870s, which depend absolutely on the artist's analyti-
cal interpretation of the motif before him, they retain a quality of
purely imaginative invention that marked many of the sensuously
romantic works of the beginning of his career. The evolution within
this theme— the easing of narrative implication and its dependency
on his own self-knowledge of the creation of the "art of museums"
that he desired2 — is far from clear. But as one begins to understand
better the absence of any clear break (or rather the subliminal con-
tinuation of much of the expressive energy from the early work
throughout his entire career), the expressive pleasure to be found —
along with the enchanting skill with which he treated his subject in
watercolors such as this — becomes more accessible.

Perhaps it was this sensuality, as well as the formal rigor of his
creation, that attracted Renoir, who owned this watercolor. The
work was inherited by his son Jean, who lent it to an exhibition in
Berlin in 1927. Cezanne and Renoir were on cordial terms from
their first meeting in 1863, and they worked together in the South
of Prance in 1882. Near the end of his life, Renoir, in conversation
with the dealer Ambroise Vollard, related how he acquired this
watercolor: he was working near I'Estaque (where he visited in 1882
and again in 1888) when, by chance, he found the watercolor stuck
behind a rock, noting that Cezanne had labored over it in at least
twenty sessions.3 The myth of Cezanne as the furious titan emerged
from tales such as this and from other anecdotes about the rages the
artist would fall into over his own works, destroying or abandoning
them in the countryside — and a useful myth it was well into this
century, when Cezanne's style continued to perplex so many. The
watercolor itself, however, is in pristine condition and shows no ill
effects of abandonment in the countrvside; nor in the spontaneity of
execution does it appear to be the product of long labor. It seems
more likely that Renoir acquired the watercolor through convention-
al channels. We do know that at the first showing of Cezanne at
Vollard's in 1895, Renoir and Degas vied over another watercolor
( Degas won).4 The tale Renoir told to Vollard has often confused the
dating of this piece, which has sometimes been associated with Ren-
oir's 1882 visit to the South.'' However, it compares in handling to
works from the later part of the 1880s or early 1890s, and Renoir's
I. ile was, indeed, an innocent jest.

1 1 11

Paul Cezanne

FRENCH, 1839-1906

The House with the Cracked Walls,
1892-94

OIL ON CANVAS, 3W2 X 2^/4 INCHES

Few other landscape images in Cezanne's career solicit such
emotional response as The House with the Cracked Walls.1 An ocher-
walled farmhouse sits at the top of a steep, rocky hill; a huge shelf of
rock emerges on the right, while at the left, the earth seems terraced
■uhI is covered with only sporadic vegetation. The house itself has a
sharply extended eave on one side, a profile similar to others in
Cezanne's landscapes, such as the Maison Maria on the forested road
to the Chateau Noir (fig. 122), with the same slightly askew, off-
center single window. The site seems abandoned and the building
disintegrating, with tiles falling from the roof (two have fallen
against the rocks and one on the roof of the small structure on the
right), while the shutters and window mullions have long since been
salvaged or simply rotted away, leaving a dark, skull-like aperture.
The large fissure that rends the upper part of the house and contin-
ues below into the attached, projecting outbuilding declares a slow
but persistent collapse of the entire structure. It is indeed a haunting
image, made even more so by the exposure of the locale, the bleach-
ing light on the facade and the rock, and above all, the completely
airless quality created by the unrelieved density of the confining
ink-blue sky. It is, as Meyer Schapiro suggests, "a hermit's vision of
heat, solitude and ruin in nature— a space for the Saint Anthony of
Cezanne's youthful imagination,"2 a place without life, abandoned
and deeply forlorn. Theodore Reff has even suggested that Cezanne
ma) have intended this as a narrative; he may well have known Edgar
Allan Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" and illus-
trated "that once barely-discernible fissure... extending from the
roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base ... rapidly
widened . . . and the mighty walls came rushing asunder."3

Precedents for such romantic morbidity can be found in Cezanne's
earlv, tormented subject pictures of violence and death, and, most
spec if ically in the House of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise (fig. 123),
which Cezanne showed in the First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874,
and again, having made the selection himself, in the Exposition
Universelle of 1899-1900. 4 That picture shows the house of a suicide
in the v illage of Auvers-sur-Oise, which had about it a local legend of
despair and the macabre, and the house itself has long sustained the
implicative association given by the title, although the visual escape
into the spring-green fields beyond lightens the drama. It seems
somewhat unlikely that, just when Cezanne was joining with the
Impressionists and abandoning the darker aspects of his earlier
work, both in technique and subject, the Auvers structure would be
meant to sustain the weighted theater that seems so much more
completely realized here.5

Cezanne was often drawn to isolated and uninhabited sites, per-
haps as much by his desire to work in complete privacy as by the
attraction of such places in themselves. During the 1890s, he sought
out such sites to the east of Aix, toward the foothills of Mont Sainte-
Victoire, rather than the more populated regions where he had gone
more regularly before. The road to Le Tholonet, passing through a
sparsely wooded, rocky landscape, had particular appeal and just off
it was the abandoned quarry of Bibemus, where he kept a small hut
for his equipment within the high red walls of the artificial canyon.
He was attracted to the seldom-used house, Chateau Noir, just above
this road, belonging to an absentee chemical engineer. Despite its
local name, its walls were actually stained a deep red, not unlike the
color of the boulders in the quarry at Bibemus. It was a sinister place
with half-finished structures and pointed gothic windows that held
great appeal for Cezanne, who attempted to buy it, unsuccessfully,
although he continued to paint there throughout the 1890s.6 It is
tempting to draw parallels between the Chateau Noir (fig. 124), with
its enclosed and mysteriously distanced quality and local notorietv ( it
was sometimes called the Maison du Diable) and the present picture;
however, a better comparison in the sense of evocative landscape
motifs to which he may have been drawn would be the abandoned
mill just below the Chateau Noir, whose blocks were slowly being
reconsumed into the natural setting through the unhusbanded un-
dergrowth (fig. 125).

Unlike these sites, which may well have been quite near the
cracked house and which recur in paintings and watercolors
throughout Cezanne's later years, the cracked house is a unique
image. It is a work of remarkable absence of atmosphere and per-
spectival calculation. Except for the wedge of shadow under the
eaves and the view through the top of the window into the pitch-
black interior, no perspectival devices were used. The trapezoidal
silhouettes of the house and its two appendages are in a subtle
repetition with the flattened outline of the right-angled projection
of the rocks. The trees stand in complete profile, and the white shelf
of rock on the right, despite the tremendously controlled suggestion
of recession through the coloristic modulation of its surface, is only
one step away from a complete identification with the picture plane,
nearly exactly like the large repoussoir that fills the similarly claus-
trophobic and dense view of the Bibemus quarry, The Red Rock
(fig. 126). All surfaces are handled with equal deliberation, both in
terms of density of paint and degree of painterly animation within
any given passage: the directional strokes of the terraced bank are
paralleled in equal alignment to the side of the house, the leaves, or
the sky itself. The drawing of the tree trunks aligns in a nonspatial
manner, the left limb of the double-branched tree, third from the
left, overlaying exactly the trunk of the tree behind it, while the
etched line that describes the edge of the large white rocks does as
much to hold its projection to the picture's surface as to create the
crevice into which the house sinks. The most dramatic passage of the
painting— the frayed outline of the cracks themselves— is the one
element that departs from the measured application of all other

Paul Cezanne

FRENCH, 1839-1906

Seated Peasant, 1895-1900
oil on canvas, 21v2 x 173^ inches

A s EARLY AS 1923, Georges Riviere related the sitter for Seated
Peasant to those men who posed for the series of cardplayers painted
by Cezanne beginning about 1890 (see fig. 127). Although this
rather melancholy voung man who sits stolidly on a simple cane chair
cannot be identified as one of the models in any of the five versions
of cardplayers,1 he almost certainly was, like them, one of the farm
hands who worked at Cezanne's mother's house, the Jas de Bouffan,
near Aix, and to whom Cezanne turned through the 1890s for his
figure studies. Some of these figures recur in several paintings and
watercolors;2 others, like this man, appear only once. Most of them
are posed in a simple, plastered room, probably in the chateau itself,
the only ornament being an applied wooden chair rail.

This is a remarkably hermetic picture, smaller than any other of
his male studies of this decade and, perhaps because of this, more
concentrated and refined in handling. A highly restricted palette of
grays, blues, browns, gray greens, and pale yellows is only occasional-
ly relieved with touches of red and purple. The build-up of a lean
application is remarkably harmonious and studied. Wetter, attenuat-
ed strokes, such as the purple strip on the right knee or the two drips
of terre-verte on the whitewashed wall at lower right, seem almost
gaily spontaneous in the otherwise stern development of the picture.

For so seemingly simple a composition, the spatial illusion is very
complex. The room appears to be L-shaped, the wall, with its contin-
uation of the chair rail, projecting into the space to the right of the
f igure and then turning parallel to the plane of the back wall, band-
ed with a panel of whitewash that is not aligned with the chair rail.
The perspective of the chair is directly frontal, receding symmetri-
cally to one vanishing point for both sides of the caned seat and the
one rail visible between the man's legs. However, the small perspecti-
val wedge on the right is so surrounded by the ample thigh, the fall
of the coattail (which almost but not quite comes into contact with
the chair), and the triangle of wall seen beyond the chair that its
spatial implications are quite different from those of the more simply
constructed section to the left— although this area, too, is made more
complicated by the inexplicable white form that appears under the
sitter's projecting hip, where the wooden rail must be attached to the
caning.

The spatial animation of the picture is heightened by the intro-
duction on the lower left of an intricate still life. A group of geomet-
rical objects — two green-bound books, two small boxes, a white
square object with a round top, possiblv a small bottle, and a stick-
seem to be carefully placed on a heavy cloth, raised (by a crate?)
above floor level. Cezanne often introduced still-life elements into
his male figure studies— the book-strewn library in which he painted
the critic Gustave Geffroy in 1895 (fig. 128) being perhaps his most

complex perspectival exercise— although never do they play such an
independent role as here, as if their introduction were meant almost
as some type of spatial subplot . This is truly a case of a figure taking
on the aspect of one more still-life element in the composition, very
much the "apple" that Cezanne requested Ambroise Vollard to be-
come when he sat for his portrait in 1899.' Not only is the painting
daunting in a formal sense, but there also remains, as in many of
Cezanne's figure studies and portraits of the 1890s, a vaguely dis-
turbing irresoluteness in its final psychological expression.

Many of the farm hands who posed for Cezanne at the Jas de
Bouffan were older men with whom he felt great sympathy and
perhaps a degree of identity, admiring their "simplicity and natural
dignity."4 They, like him, had stayed in their native region, rejecting
the modern ways of the North.5 After 1902 these sentiments would
culminate in a series of studies of his aged gardener, Vallier, at the
studio at Les Lauves, two of which are posed quite similarly to the
figure here. However, the Seated Peasant, for all his forbearance,
seems lacking, to a degree, in this kind of vivid presence. He is
dressed in a jacket and yellow vest (very much like the clothes Ce-
zanne must have worn, as documented by a photograph of the artist
taken by K.-X. Roussel in 1906),6 and with a tightly knotted string tie
(also like that described as having been worn by Cezanne).7 Sullenly
he poses for the artist in his slightly oversized coat, his striped
trousers loosely fitting his rather stout form. His mouth is drawn
down into a habitually natural line, one assumes; his exaggeratedly
huge, literally ham-fisted hand comes, because of its disproportion-
ate scale, well out from his chest. His complete frontality — shoulders
in an even balance with the folded hands and crossed legs— places
him even more monumentally in the space. Here is some type of
blunt life force, firmly and irrefutably planted in bovine melancholy.

With the exception of identifiable portraits, none of Cezanne's
male figure studies of the 1890s, including the cardplayers, can be
clearly dated, although this picture has always been placed within the
second half of the decade.8 A "Portrait of a seated man with crossed
legs, folded hands, gray background" appears in Vollard's stock
books by igoo,9 although there is no certainty that this is the same
picture. By comparison with other works on this scale. Seated Peasant
stands well apart from the Standing Peasant (fig. 129), which can be
stylistically related quite closely to the cardplayers, and the studies
for them from the early years of the decade. In turn, in his painting
of a figure of a peasant now in Ottawa (fig. 130)— although some-
what larger— with the legs similarly terminated at the ankles, Ce-
zanne pulled the whole figure more tightly to the picture plane. Some-
what less confined and hermetic in its handling and spatial
definition, the Ottawa picture of the peasant, justly placed after the
turn of the century, contrasts strikingly in his cunning and alert
animation to the figure here. A closer comparison can be drawn to
the Man with Folded Arms, which appears in two variants (see fig.
116),10 although there is an elegance to the lean model who posed for
them that is quite distinct from the Annenberg painting. As always in
comparing images within any given category of Cezanne's work, one
returns to the idea that it is his direct response to the subject— in this
case the stolid and beefy young peasant— that dictated the form his
picture would take. jjr

Paul Cezanne

FRENCH, 1839-1906

Still Life with Watermelon and Pomegranates,
1900-1906

WATERCOLOR AND PENCIL ON PAPER, 12 X 18V2
INCHES

Even in comparison with the other large watercolors done by
Cezanne near the end of his life, this work stands as a particularly
audacious achievement. Five rounded objects— a melon, two pome-
granates, a glass water carafe, and the same white sugar bowl that
appears in Dish of Apples (p. 76) completely fill a tabletop. The forms
are first established by a light network of drawn pencil lines over
which Cezanne flooded abundant panels of transparent color,
which, playing off the exposed white of the paper, gives these modest
objects a monumentality that is equal in spatial effect to that of his oil
still lifes and exceeds them in coloristic brilliance. Rarely does the
artist respond so directly to the reflective interrelationships of ob-
jects, the yellow pomegranate mirrored in the sheen of the melon,
the green and lavender light flashing from the cut flutes on the
carafe, the objects laid into a luminous shadow reflected from the
polished table surface.

Emile Bernard recorded a set of observations made to him by
Cezanne, whom he visited in Aix in 1904. One statement seems
particularly apt in terms of this watercolor: "Drawing and color are

not separate at all; insofar as you paint, you draw. The more the
color harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. When the
color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness. The contrast
and connections of tone— there you have the secret of drawing and
modeling."1

Geometry plays little role in Cezanne's spatial creation. Even the
table edge, begun on the left as an exposed sliver of white paper, is
transformed by a streak of purple wash, disappearing altogether to
the right. The wall beyond— perhaps with an opening to the left into
another room— falls as a curtain of color dynamically progressing
from cool to warm, right to left. The inexplicable white form just at
the left edge— a partially seen porcelain object2 or the outline of a
chair back — sets the plane by its open silhouette.

Some of the abundant richness of this watercolor comes directly
from the artist's response to the objects themselves. He used them,
with the introduction of a wine bottle, in another watercolor of
equal liberality, although more linearly analytical (fig. 131). The pres-
ence of the cut melon in another work (fig. 132) dispels the previous
confusion of this simple, rounded form with an eggplant.3 As John
Rewald has noted,4 the almost formidable monumentality of Ce-
zanne's work put off at least one early critic and, indeed, in works
such as this— as with the late Mont Sainte-Victoire and bather sub-
jects— Cezanne exceeded his own earlier powers to bring creation
into balance with observation and the handling of his materials into
accord with spatial definition. The colors and their relationship to
the objects in space are brought here to a peak of harmonic intensity.
Humble observations, such as the four thumbtack marks still clearly
visible from when Cezanne pinned the sheet of heavy, woven paper
to his board, bring one soberly back to the simplicity of his materials

and the grandeur of his creation.

6 .1.1 R

Paul Cezanne

FRENCH, 1839-1906

Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1904
watercolor on paper, 12v8 x g3/4 inches

This watercolor showing Mont Sainte-Victoire through a pro-
scenium of arching trees first appeared in Cezanne literature in
1953;1 its attribution was confirmed by Francois Daulte the following
year.2

The sheet bears an inscription on the reverse in a bold hand, later
reinforced by darker ink: 'Annee 1904/de Paul Cezanne/Emile Ber-
nard." Beneath this in finer script appears: "Mars 1936/Cette ac-
quarelle de Paul Cezanne a appartenu a la collection de mon pere le
peintre Fmile Bernard/Michel-Ange Bernard" (March 1936/This
watercolor by Paul Cezanne belonged to the collection of my father
the painter Emile Bernard/Michel-Ange Bernard).

Emile Bernard had, on his return from Egypt, visited Cezanne in
Aix in 1904, striking up a friendship that provided, through Ber-

nard's later recording of their conversations,5 rare insights into the
attitudes and working methods of the reclusive Cezanne late in his
life. Bernard documented the visit by painting a portrait of Cezanne;
he also copied a still life by the older artist.4 Cezanne allowed him to
stay on the lower floor of his studio just outside Aix at Les Lauves,
the very building— the one in the middle ground here — that com-
manded such a magisterial view of the mountain, which became the
dominant motif for Cezanne in his late landscapes. Despite the wary
and sometimes suspicious temperament of the isolated artist, Ber-
nard's visit seems to have been mutually pleasurable for both men;
their correspondence continued over the next two years.

The encounter for Bernard was profound. As he noted in a letter
to his wife: 'After looking at the situation in retrospect, I think that I
can be considered as his spiritual son and, as such, truly respectful of
my old master, because, as you know, I always wrote, fought, and
spoke in order to justify and defend the old and forgotten Impres-
sionist and to praise his glory even though I had nothing to gain
from these actions (since I possess only a watercolor of his, of the
Mont Sainte-Victoire, seen from his studio, which he offered me as
thanks for having done his portrait during our visit of 1904)."5

Paul Cezanne

FRENCH, 1839-1906

Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-6
oil on canvas, 22l/4 x 3878 inches

Upon THE DEATH of his mother in 1899, Cezanne was forced to
sell the Jas de Bouffan, the large property outside Aix, in order to
settle her estate and divide the proceeds with his two sisters. The loss
of this house, where he had lived and worked since childhood, must
have been a grave blow for a man so completely settled in his ways
and patterns of working.1 He moved to an apartment in the center of
the city, but it was not long before he bought a site just north of Aix
and there built a studio that he started to use in the fall of 1902. It
was placed on the slope of the hill called Les Lauves, which com-
manded a grand and encompassing view of Aix to the south and, to
the east, the vast, sweeping plain with quilted fields, farmhouses, and
clumps of trees that terminate in the majestic profile of Mont Sainte-
Victoire.

This great marble pile, rising dramatically from the valley in the
intense southern light, had long been a symbol of Provence.2 Ce-
zanne recorded it with loving attention from the 1870s on; there are
some fifty-five images of it among his paintings and watercolors,
making it one of his most repeated and varied themes.3 In many of
the earlier views, such as those taken from Bellevue, the mountain
forms a blunted cone; later he drew closer to its base, working at the
Chateau Noir or Bibemus quarry. When seen from the village of
Gardanne, the profile stretches to become a craggy plateau. From
the heights of Les Lauves the mountain presents its most dramatic
profile: the slowly rising contours from the north (the left in the
pictures) crest in a stupendous peak of rock, then fall steeply away,

the land lifting toward the south into the broad slopes of Mont du
Cengle.4

Cezanne painted this view at least fourteen times after his move to
Les Lauves in 1902, as well as addressing it in numerous watercol-
ors. None of these objects is a repetition of another; each comes at
the motif from a different point of view, focusing on individual
elements in the near, middle, and far grounds. Many seem to be in
direct response to the changing light and atmosphere that sweep
over the broad plain. Cezanne's response to transient climatic effects
in these paintings is utterly different from the Impressionist re-
sponse to temporal effects, yet the ranges of mood and temperament
within these pictures clearly suggest specific awareness of changes
of light and atmosphere. Cumulatively his pictures of Mont Sainte-
Victoire embody, perhaps more than any other set of images, his
last titanic struggle to weld nature into art through his profoundly
complex workings of color. They have often been discussed in the
grandest terms, Lionello Venturi finding the late paintings of Mont
Sainte-Victoire a transformation by the artist into a nearly "cosmic"
realm of creation: "The structure is more and more implied, and less
and less apparent."5 We can grasp dimly, albeit through the heated
literary style of Joachim Gasquet, who pretends to recall his conver-
sations with Cezanne much after his death, what the mountain
meant for Cezanne: "Look at Ste.-Victoire. What elan, what an impe-
rious thirst for the sun, and what melancholy in the evening, when all

this weightiness falls back to earth These masses were made of

fire. Fire is in them still. Both darkness and daylight seem to recoil
from them in fear, trembling. There above us is Plato's cave: see how,
as large clouds pass by, the shadow that they cast shudders on the
rocks, as if burned, suddenly swallowed by a mouth of fire."6

As grandiose and naively pretentious as Gasquet may have been,
the urgent sense of drama he brought to the theme in response to
the painting has affected nearly all those who have written about
these pictures since.

The present view is from a point near the studio. As John Rewald
has noted, "To reach it, he turned left from the main road into a
lane called Chemin des Marguerites, to the right of which lies a field
that yields this view of the immense valley dominated by Sainte-Vic-
toire."7 Rewald photographed this site about 1935 (fig. 133), before
the urban spread from the city engulfed it forever. The small,
wedgelike farmhouse to the far right was still standing; the more
extended set of buildings, still in place, dominated the forward layer
of the middle ground. Cezanne did three pictures of this general
vista: two watercolors and the present painting. One watercolor (fig.
134 ),8 nearly square, is taken from essentially the same elevation as
the painting in its left half, the cluster of farm buildings again in line
with the crest of the mountain, although the north slope humps up
more gently and the transition across the plain to its base is more
f luidly crossed by diagonals in and through the clumps of trees. One
pistachio tree flames up in the foreground, its spreading limbs estab-
lishing the lyrical movement that continues throughout the picture.
In another sheet (fig. 135),9 he drew closer to the buildings, lower
and more to the right, with the mountains placed farther to the left.
In executing this version, Cezanne progressed through two distinct
experimental phases; at some point in its evolution he decided to
expand the sheet to the right by adding a second piece of paper,
which allowed him to show more of the valley, making the broad,
horizontal plain of Mont du Cengle, in intense blue and purple, the
dominant element. In so doing, he also set the house more absolutely
in the middle ground, and further expressed the vaporous, distant
presence of Mont Sainte-Victoire itself.

Considered together, these two watercolors are revealing in com-
parison with the Annenberg picture, which itself underwent a dra-
matic creative evolution. As evidenced by the photograph of the
painting first published by Venturi in 1936 (fig. 136), 10 in which the
divisions were more apparent, it is clear that the painting was execut-
ed on five different pieces of canvas that, judging by their varying
textures and the artist's technique within a given area, were added
over a period of time (fig. 137) " The dominant image of the moun-
tain is tight Iv contained within the section to the upper left (measur-
ing 17'/? by 25Vi inches). To this section two narrow, vertical strips
were added at the right (about 2'/s by 17'/.! inches each); they
extend the view over to the isolated, small farmhouse. Another
broad se< Hon at ross the bottom (about 4'/s by 30V8 inches ) extends
to the firs) of t Ik- two vertical strips and allows the artist to expand
downward through the yellow, sloping hill. A f ifth, vertical section
<22'4 by 8 inches) was added to the right, allowing the incorporation

of still more of the broad plain of Mont du Cengle and the valley
before it. In a general way Cezanne was paralleling what he had
accomplished in the extended watercolor, although in much more
deliberate additive phases. Through the creation of a sweeping,
horizontal format, he was able to address the grand vista down the
valley so aptly recorded in the 1935 photograph. The question is, of
course, how he carried out this process, in what sequence, and,
finally — in comparison with other views of the mountain— to what
formal and expressive ends.

There is little intrinsic physical evidence in the additions to the
painting to aid in plotting the state of the image at the time of each
addition. Brush strokes continue over all the divisions onto adjoining
sections, the artist clearly working overall on the evolving format, in
the method recorded by those who witnessed him at work late in his
life.12 However, the largest single section, that of the essential image,
is on a standard-size, commercially available canvas.13 Despite their
diversity of scale, all of the late Mont Sainte-Victoires are, with two
exceptions, on these prestretched canvases, which were readily avail-
able from suppliers of artists' materials.14 It therefore seems likely
that Cezanne, in his early consideration of this painting, conceived of
it as a quite restricted view of the mountain, focusing in very tightly
in a way not unlike the format of the watercolor now in the National
Gallery of Ireland in Dublin (fig. 138). How far he got in the execu-
tion before his decision to expand the composition (both downward
and to the right) is not clear. Since the lower addition extends to the
limits of the original canvas, it seems likely that his first objective was
to gain more space in the foreground; this format has parallels in the
Zurich watercolor (fig. 134) and, more pointedly, the painting in
Moscow (fig. 139). This is, however, speculation: there are great
limitations in comparing works from one medium to another within
Cezanne's oeuvre, since it is clear that for him drawings, watercolors,
and paintings retained considerable independence from one an-
other, with very few direct parallels between them. Perhaps having
experimented by extending the two-sheet watercolor, he made the
bold decision to shift his composition radically and began the three-
stage expansion to the right, each step allowing him to adjust his
response to his motif, which has parallels in other works.

Based on what we know of Cezanne's working methods, such a
procedure is rare, if not unique. Among the Impressionists, such
manipulation of format is evident in the works of Degas before the
1890s, of which there are numerous examples of sections added
during the evolution of a work.15 However, given Cezanne's consider-
able distance from Degas, both temperamentally and in their quite

9°

opposite artistic intentions, it seems highly unlikely that any parallel
can be drawn. Other than the extended watercolor, there seems to
be only one other occurrence among the surviving works of physical
manipulation of a canvas: a panoramic View of L'Estaque from the Sea
(fig. 140), nearly a third of which has clearly been added to the
right.16 Equally perplexing is the actual format of the completed
picture. On at least three occasions Cezanne took advantage of the
long horizontal of his open sketchbook to draw extended vistas (fig.
141);17 the early painting The Cutting, now in Munich, follows a similar
format, as does the freely painted view of Auvers: Le Quartier du Val
Harme of a decade later.18 There are also the two very elongated
decorative paintings of Nymphs by the Sea, although these were done
as overdoors for Victor Chocquet and follow a well-established deco-
rative shape from the eighteenth century.19

Such comparisons do little to clarify in any essential way the
present picture. It, however, if taken in isolation, does provide its
own explanation of its development. The mountain is presented
with a nearly pristine clarity, its contours elegantly established by
strokes of brilliant blue; the western slope, constructed of fine, trans-
lucent brushwork over white priming, flashes back the radiant light
that falls over the entire landscape. This same light puts the north
slope into luminous shadow. The sky behind the peak is evenly paint-
ed with modulated strokes of green, blue, and lavender, with patches
of white interspersed within it as serenely floating clouds. The valley
beneath the mountain proceeds downward in stately layers of green
and ocher to the large farmhouse, which, in its clear, geometric
articulation, sits firmly within the surrounding fields and trees.
However, as the composition extends downward, the paint is laid on
with a broader and wetter brush, the color modulations constricting
into more tightly knit sets of spatial adjustments. The same is true of
the handling to the right of the mountain, the now more upright
strokes within the plain increasing in breadth and energy of applica-
tion. The greens and blues of the sky in the right third of the picture

verge into near abstraction of color harmony as they sweep off the
edge of the canvas, much of which is left bare in the vigor of execu-
tion. Yet, the small farmhouse, in three-quarter perspective, spatially
defines itself within the ocher field to the left and establishes the
rhythm of recession in space that extends beyond it, into the south-
ern part of the valley.

The expressive impact is one of immense acceleration from left to
right, almost to the point of optically bending the space into a great
arch, as the scale of brushwork increases and the color drops in value
in response to the dark purple outlines of Mont du Cengle across the
panorama. The artistic battle at stake here— perhaps it is not too
much of an exaggeration to use such a theatrical term for this pic-
ture— is to express the exaltation of the grandly encompassing view
and at the same time to maintain a sense of topographical space
throughout the long extent of the canvas in its final form. In this,
Cezanne, working stroke by stroke on the whole painting as his
ambitions for it shifted throughout its physical evolution, wrestled
with a formidable artistic problem: the danger of creating a picture
in which "color had remained color without becoming the expres-
sion of distance."20 This problem he masterfully solved. Given our
knowledge of the canvas additions, we are allowed a unique insight
into his visual and mental processes and are awed at the success of his
resolution.

Each of the late Mont Sainte-Victoires has a profoundly unique
expressive quality. Here, what began as one of his most serene and
refined, nearly crystalline, recordings of the motif builds symphoni-
cally, with no loss of the initial intent, into a mightier, more majestic
image. As he would do in numerous other pictures near the end of
his life, although with fewer sequential stages than here, he attained
in this landscape the goal he stressed to Emile Bernard in April 1904:
his desire to record "the spectacle that the Pater Omnipotens Ae-
terne Deus spreads out before our eyes."21

J J R

Paul Gauguin

FRENCH, 1848-1903

ThE Siesta, 1892-94

OIL ON CANVAS, 34'^ X 45n/i6 INCHES

Three women in missionary dress (even the white-printed blue
pareu worn by the foremost figure is made of fabric manufactured
in England for the South Seas market) lounge on a porch that ex-
tends into a sun-drenched lawn. A fourth, more industrious, figure
presses a pile of white and red fabrics with a f latiron at the far end of
the porch. Beyond them, in a shadow cast by the porch roof or the
house to which it is attached, one woman squats on her haunches,
engaged in some endeavor out of our sight, while near her a sixth
form, extremely difficult to decipher, could be a woman sprawled
comfortably on her side, initiating, perhaps, the picture's title, which
does not appear in the early literature.1 It is a genre scene of domes-
tic ease and desultory activity,2 with little or no suggestion of the
brooding sensuality that so often pervades Gauguin's depictions of
Tahitian women; and it is almost completely lacking in the implied
narrative so often employed in his multifigure compositions. Every-
thing here is untroubled. As evidenced by a contemporary photo-
graph taken by Gauguin's friend Charles Spitz (fig. 142), 3 Gauguin
was depicting a daily occurrence, perhaps indeed at siesta time,
given the long shadows and raking light, when Tahitian women
gathered in communal ease, disposing themselves with an unaffect-
ed grace, which was one of the first things that attracted Gauguin
upon his arrival in Papeete in 1891. 4

Despite its immediacy — John Rewald likens the picture to a snap-
shot5—it is one of Gauguin's most carefully considered and formally
developed works and one that draws on numerous visual sources for
its spontaneous effect. The grand foreground figure, resting on her
hand, recalls in her simply rounded form and contained outline the
frescoes of Giotto and the Italian primitives, postcards of which
Gauguin carried with him to Tahiti.6 Even her huge foot, with its
earth-green highlights, rests firmly on the pink and lavender planks
in an exact outline. The woman just beyond is shown in equally
precise profile; it is only with the two other women on the porch that
Gauguin's firm compositional control eased somewhat, although the
o( ( urrence in another picture of the figure in a pink blouse seated
on the edge of the porch7 suggests the care with which he has noted
and adjusted her pose here. The landscape parallels the careful
blocking out of the total pictorial space: panels of highlight and
shadow in peach, sharp yellow green, orange yellow, and deep green
lift away from the spatial perspective of the porch, continuing the
interplay ol two and three dimensions. The emphatic perspective of
the boards oi the porch— a rare device in the Tahitian pictures, in
whi< !i spatial illusion most often depends on color relationships and
overlapping (< >i ins— prompted Michel I loog to speculate that for this
picture- Gauguin turned to specific Japanese prints, particularly a
colored engraving of a temple with a sharp prospec tive (fig. 143).8
Degas, who often used diagonal linear perspective with great subtle-
ty (fig. 26), seems a more likely source.9

I Ik < ru bral calculation used in creating this picture may argue
for a date of iKc)4, the year after Gauguin, feeling the hopelessness
of His financial situation in Tahiti, and perhaps sensing that he

had overdone his retreat from Western culture, returned to France.
His reimmersion into European art, past and present, as well as a
certain emotional distance from his Tahitian subject matter, could
partially explain the unique position this picture holds within his
oeuvre. However, in other documented works from this Parisian
interval, when he did continue, both in painting and in prints, to
deal with Tahitian subjects, there is a calculated exploitation of his
themes— a formal manipulation of them into more decorative and
abstract images— that is absent here. In The Siesta, for all the control
exercised, the final effect is in complete harmony with an immediate
sense of place. Therefore, a date just prior to his departure seems
more likely. The notion that the picture may have been executed
early on his return to the South Seas in 1895 is essentially dispelled
by Richard Bret tells observation that this size canvas— a standard
size 50 sent from Paris— was frequently used by him in Tahiti during
the first stay, but does not recur thereafter.10

There is also the possibility that the work, particularly given its
great importance within his oeuvre, was carried with him on his
return. This speculation is partially supported by the physical evolu-
tion of the picture as we know it, since there are numerous evidences
of a rethinking of the composition and of the specific elements
within it, as well as radical color changes, which are established by
close examination of the surface." Still vaguely visible just to the
right of the first porch post, under the small bush and the pink-and-
yellow patch of lawn, is the outline of a seated figure, possibly an-
other version of the figure of the woman seated at the edge of the
porch. Even in its present location the figure has been adjusted.
Gauguin also rethought the lower right section of the painting,
where the loosely woven basket now appears. At one point this object
was the image of a small dog, whose outline is still suggested by the
blue lines that deflect away from the perspective lines of the porch;
its nose can be discerned at the side of the basket and its body
extends to the right (fig. 144).

Changes in color during the physical history of the picture are
equally complex. The deep blue of the sarong of the central figure
was originally a rich red, not unlike that in the sarong, also with
white flowers, of the girl in On the Beach (1891, Musee d'Orsay,
Paris)12 or the nearly identical red cloth worn by the woman in the
provocative Otahi (private collection).13 The first color is clearly evi-
dent through the drying crackle of the blue. The white cloth on
which the woman in red now lies may have been enlarged when the
dog was painted out. The pink of the porch can be seen through
areas of the cloth, especially near its edges. Finally, it has been
pointed out that the flat top of the straw hat worn by the central
figure bears repaints.14 These repaints, assuredly by Gauguin, judg-
ing from the technique, cover flake losses in a layer that had com-
pletely dried before the second application of paint.

As striking as these changes may be, they are hardly unique for
Gauguin, who in nearly all of his more ambitious canvases went
through a period of compositional readjustment with shifts in color
balance to achieve his final effect. There is almost certainly no
evidence of "unfinish" at any point in the surface where it has been
suggested — perhaps because of the strongly silhouetted forms and
the flattened fields of color— that some final degree of modification
is absent.15 It is a painting on which the artist seems to have worked
for a considerable time, yet its actual date remains unclear, without
any further documentation concerning its early history. It clearly is a
work that absorbed Gauguin completely, and his efforts were fully
justified by the grandness of his final achievement.

Paul Gauguin

FRENCH, 1848-1903

Still Life with Teapot and Fruit, 1896

OIL ON CANVAS, l8s4 X 26 INCHES

O N A simple plank table, common objects from Gauguin's daily
life in Tahiti are carefully laid out on a white napkin: a Japanese
teapot (decorated with reeds and a crane in blue underglaze), a
wooden spoon, a turned earthenware jug, seven mangoes in varying
degrees of ripeness, and an eighth, smaller fruit, perhaps another
mango. The backdrop is deep blue; on it are two brilliant, yellow,
stenciled flowers. The right side of this wall is pierced by an opening
through which is seen a half-length nude figure, some distance back,
in profile silhouetted against a sun-dappled landscape. While all the
elements are completely of the place, nothing could be more differ-
ent from the three other Tahitian pictures in this exhibition, or from
the great majority of pictures done during the last decade of Gau-
guin's life. As brilliant as the colors are here— in the sensuous pulpi-
ness of the fruit and the exotic patterns of the background — it is a
still life realized completely within the manner of his French contem-
poraries. It is arguably the closest he ever drew, in his mature works,
to Cezanne. Camille Pissarro's skepticism at Gauguin's notion that
"the young would find salvation by replenishing themselves at re-
mote and savage sources"1 seems perfectly justified. It is as if the
great distance from Paris intensified Gauguin's memory of his
French sources.

Cezanne, among all the older figures of the Impressionist move-
ment, most impressed Gauguin. They seem to have first met,
through the intercession of Pissarro, at Pontoise in the late 1870s.
Although their relationship was far from intimate — Cezanne re-
ferred to Gauguin's paintings as "Chinese images"2 and later in his
life warned younger painters away from the decorative influence of
Gauguin and his circle — Gauguin's devotion to Cezanne's paintings
was immense. While still a well-to-do stockbroker, following his mar-
riage in 1873 and just after becoming aware of this group of pro-
gressive painters, Gauguin started to form a collection of their work,
to which he would carefully add until the disastrous stock-market
collapse in 1882, which hastened his abandonment of his own bour-
geois life and provided his final liberation as an independent painter.
In his collection were five or six works by Cezanne.3 He took the
collection with him in 1884 to Copenhagen, where he briefly joined
his wife and family. While he was slowly forced to sell off the paint-
ings over the next several years of severe hardship, there was one
work by Cezanne with which he was most reluctant to part: Still Life
with Apples in a Compote (fig. 145). 4 This picture, used by Maurice
Denis in his Hommage to Cezanne in 1900, nurtured Gauguin through
his remaining years in France: its elements recur in at least three
paintings from the Bretagne period,5 and Gauguin copied it exactly
in the background of his Portrait of a Woman, with Still Life by Cezanne
of 1890 (fig. 146). At the time of his return trip to Paris in 1893, li

seems to have been the one important possession he still retained
from his earlier life— his dealer Ambroise Vollard noted that the
Cezanne was the featured object in Gauguin's meager studio on the
rue Vercingetorix.6 And even in this still life, painted three years
later and far away from the Cezanne picture itself, the densely
worked surface of hot, contrasting colors (Cezanne accused Gauguin
of stealing "my little sensations");7 the spatial manipulation of the
gathered, white cloth and the angled eating implements (Gauguin
substituted a spoon for Cezanne's ivory-handled knife);8 and, above
all else, the monumental realization of these forms within a box of
space show that for Gauguin, "his" Cezanne was still vivid in his
mind. Even the floral ornaments in the background, often taken to
be Gauguin's imaginative departure from the type of flat designs he
saw in Tahiti, are now proved to be drawn from the pattern on the
printed or stenciled cloth he used to bind his own copy of his satirical
newspaper, Le Sourire,9 and are Gauguin's "Tahitian" response to the
blue-gray wallpaper with emerging floral patterns in Cezanne's still
life. As Richard Brettell has noted, "Gauguin 'translates' Cezanne
into Tahitian."10

The haunting figure seen through the opening is Gauguin's one
complete departure from the model of the Cezanne still life: while
Cezanne would often break the continuous background of his pic-
tures with shifting architectural elements that recede into deeper,
terminating planes, he never allowed such a dramatic release from
his contained, illusionistic space. However, such a device — particular-
ly with a figure in profile — was often used by Degas, and early on
Gauguin took it up as one of his favored means of enlivening his own
still lifes while introducing a turn of narrative suggestion. As early as
1886, in his portrait of Charles Laval, the two elements of still life
and portrait complement one another playfully, if enigmatically. The
same relationship occurs frequently in the Tahitian still lifes — note
particularly the girl, seen almost as a framed portrait, in the 1901
Sunflowers on a Chair1— while the introduction of a detached, en-
framed figure brings to a theatrical climax such pictures as The Spirit
of the Dead Watching.12 Here, however, the seemingly benign figure
has less dramatic import— as if the powerful reality of the still-life
elements dispel any mystical intrusion — and one suspects that its
inclusion is Gauguin's attempt to distance himself from Cezanne and
the Western tradition.

It is ironic that in 1897, the year following the execution of this
picture, Gauguin wrote to the Paris dealer Chaudet requesting that
he sell the Cezanne for the low price of six hundred francs, so
hopeless were the artist's finances. Chaudet did so, although only
half the money reached Gauguin before his death. Still Life with
Teapot and Fruit marks the peak of Gauguin's absorption with the
artist who governed so much of his development; thereafter Ce-
zanne's influence on Gauguin ebbed and that of Degas and Puvis de
Chavannes reemerged to partially soften his spatial imagery. How-
ever, even near the end of his life, in his journal Avant et apres, he
wrote about works by Cezanne: "It is better to go and see them. The
bowl and ripe grapes exceed the border, on the napkin the apples,
green and those which are prunish red blend. The whites are blue

and the blues are white. What a painter Cezanne was!"13

v JJR

Paul Gauguin

FRENCH, 1848-1903

Three Tahitian Women, 1896

OIL ON PANEL, gWrf X 17 INCHES

To the unknown collector, I salute you. That he may excuse the
barbary of this little picture: the state of my soul is, no doubt, the
cause. I recommend a modest frame and if possible one with a glass,
so that while it ages it can retain its freshness and be preserved from
the alterations that are always produced by the fetid air of an apart-
ment" (Paul Gauguin). This modest bit of instruction for the future
care of his painting, so humble and practical for an artist known for
his rages and harsh demands on himself and the world, once accom-
panied this panel.1 The letter is on a drawing (fig. 147) that relates to
another painting, one he did in Paris after his return from his first
trip to Tahiti in 1893.2 The note has the poignancy of a letter in a
bottle set loose at sea, optimistically assuming that this thing on
which he had lavished so much care would, in the hands of some
future owner, receive the attention it deserved.

It is an object almost unique in the tremendously vigorous output
of Gauguin during the last phase of his life in Tahiti, where, cutting
himself off by progressive degrees from contact with his European
connections, he pursued his "savage" vision with remarkable energy
and tenacity despite nearly constant physical and financial hardship.
During this time he succeeded with heroic magnitude, in canvases of
monumental scale and grandeur. Yet, in Three Tahitian Women, his
interest was more that of the subtle craftsman, the Gauguin of the
woodcuts and wooden sculpture, whose intention was not to jar and
seduce his Parisian audience, as with the works he sent in batches to
his dealer Ambroise Vollard, but rather to take pleasure in the
complex working of this small panel.

The piece of teak on which he painted was a door from a cabinet
or compartmented chest. One hinge, over which the painted compo-
sition carefully continues (and which still moves on its pin!), is still
present on the upper right side; the lower hinge was pulled off,
leaving a cutout profile. Paintings on panel are rare for Gauguin at
any point in his career, although he was constantly in search of good,
hard woods for his sculpture, especially in Tahiti. It would be tempt-
ing, it sentimental, to assume that he had reached a point of despera-
tion (.is was evident in his pleas for proper paper and canvas to
Vollard and his loyal friend Georges-Daniel de Monfreid, in which
his frequent complaint and threat was that he simply did not have the
materials to < ontinue his work).3 But his use of this little door, abrupt-
ly w rem bed from a cabinet, was probably out of choice rather than
necessity. I he wood was originally painted a pale celadon green, to
judge from the dribbles on the left edge. The household paint was
roughl) scraped away, leaving an irregular sulfate, still clearly evi-
dent, over which he laid a white ground and then a thinner, and
perhaps incomplete, layer of deep alizarin red. Over this he denselv
brushed the most intense colors in a manner reminiscent of the
enameled quality of his "cloisonne" pictures from the earlier 1890s,4
although here the sharp separations of contained areas of color have
blurred and all the elements — the rose, lavender, and brilliant emer-

ald distant landscape; the iridescent stream eddving over the rocks;
and the sparsely leafed tree on the same plane as the figures— have
coalesced into a continuous, decorative unity of great delicacy. The
three self-possessed women (only one of whom returns our gaze)
seem to be quoted from memory rather than the products of direct
observation, so complete is their absorption into the landscape, their
angular gestures in harmony with the tree at right. The almost
lacquerlike buildup of the surface is underscored by the application
of the white garlands on the heads of the two women in red sarongs.
These are precisely cut, with a fine, sharp instrument, into the
surface of the paint down to the white ground, creating dazzles of
light in their blue-black hair. It is a picture of magical sumptuousness
and refinement, more a finely worked object than a robust painting.

The earliest mention of this picture appears to be in a letter to
Gauguin from his friend Monfreid, who faithfully continued to
watch over his affairs in Paris. It is dated November 11, 1898, and
enclosed with it was a check for four paintings sold by Vollard: "the
second of women bathing in a dappled [papillottant] landscape
recalls the small panel that you sold (or gave) to Dr. Gouzer."5 Wil-
denstein noted that "Gouzer" is Monfreid's confusion of Nolet (there
being only one surviving panel that fits this description), the doctor
who had gained Gauguin's confidence sufficiently to be trusted with
the safekeeping of this picture upon his return to France, in the hope
that he could sell it and send Gauguin the money.6

Monfreid's use of the word "papillottant" (butterflylike) in describ-
ing this picture and The Bathers of 1898 (fig. 148) is apt. While
painted on canvas and considerably larger (23^4 by 36^4 inches), the
later picture shares with this panel the envelopment of the figures by
the landscape, all areas of the surface equally intense in contrasted,
brilliant highlights and saturated shadows, creating a slightly
blurred, dazzling surface not unlike the wings of an exotic butterfly.
In their unity of decorative harmony, the two pictures resemble
works such as The Bathers of 1897 (Barber Institute, Manchester) or
the most complexly refined of Gauguin's pictures in this mode, the
Tahitian Pastoral of 1898 (The Tate Gallery, London).7 In his small
group of works from the i8gos in which the figures and the land-
scape are given equal balance, Gauguin is perhaps paying tribute to
one of his pantheon of the truly great, Puvis de Chavannes (1824-
1898),8 whose works have the detachment and innocent purity (and
slight rhetoric) of true allegory. But unlike them, Gauguin's paintings
of this type are permeated with a haunting sensuality, a quality of
erotic dreaminess, quite different from the monumentally realized
figures that dominate his work of the late 1890s and that stand as his
more public declarations.

Perhaps it was to this small and quite special group of "papillot-
tant" paintings, of which this picture is the first and, in many ways-
given its small scale and splendid state of preservation— the most
magical, that Gauguin was referring when he wrote late in his life
from the isolation of the Marquesas Islands: "I have lingered among
the nymphs of Corot, dancing in the sacred wood of Ville-d'Avrav."9
"These nymphs, I want to perpetuate them, with their golden skins,
their searching animal odour, their tropical savours. They are here
what they are everywhere, have always been, will always be. That
adorable Mallarme immortalized them, gay, with their vigilant love
of life and the flesh, beside the ivy of Ville-d'Avray that entwines the
oaks of Corot ."10

Paul Gauguin

FRENCH, 1848-1903

Portrait of Women (Mother and Daughter ),
igol or 1902

OIL ON CANVAS, 29 X ^6l/4 INCHES

Two women, nearly one and a half times life size, sit before an
open field bordered by a thatched hut, three isolated trees, and a
distant line of dense foliage. Their half-length placement in the
foreground gives them the permanence and spiritual absoluteness of
Byzantine icons. The younger woman in red steadily gazes out,
protectively holding the arm of the much older woman in a purple,
floral-print missionary dress, her stare made all the more penetrat-
ing bv the absence of the whites of her eyes. The auburn hair of the
figure on the right falls over her red dress and frames her finely
drawn mouth and nostrils, while the shadows of her jaw modulate
into a green, patinated-bronze tone. The features of the older
woman are more roughly modeled, the slightly darker flesh tones
laid over deep terra verde shadows; the demarcation between the
regions of highlight and shadow has an abrupt absence of transition,
the contrast most apparent in the sharp line of shadow that cuts into
her left cheekbone and down under the jawline, over which the skin
is tautlv drawn. Through this mask her dark eves, set far back,
penetrate intensely. The two figures hold us in their different gazes
with equal steadiness. There is a measured equilibrium between
them that disallows either the ascendancy of youth or the repression
of age. Portrait of Women is a picture of tremendous dignity and
presence.

The painting is enigmatically neither signed nor dated, a rare
occurrence for Gauguin's later work, and one that has led to consid-
erable disagreement about the date of this arresting image. Argu-
ably it is the painting called "Portraits of Women" shown at the
memorial exhibition at Vollard's in 1903, 1 and its presence there
prompted its early fame; it appeared in exhibitions in Berlin, Lenin-
grad, and Prague within the next decade. Arsene Alexandre placed
it as early as Gauguin's brief trip to Martinique in 1887, mistaking the
women for Creoles,2 but it must have been done just before or after
his departure from Tahiti for the Marquesas Islands in 1901.' Within
the varied works from this time there is a certain ease of handling
(sometimes mistakenly taken as lassitude), here most apparent in the
somewhat summary treatment of the dresses and landscape, in
which the earlier tightness of execution and elaborate building up of
planes and color fields have been replaced by a more direct way of
painting. The change is confirmed by the absence of the self-con-
sciously exotic or decorative elements present in the earlier, more
"Tahitian" paintings. Color has returned to its observed, nondecora-
tive state. The br illiant, exotic color that permeates the landscapes
of the 1890s has departed, the cloud-dotted blue sky here recalling
1'iss.ii ro as well as ( lauguin's own initial experimentation with land-
scape earl\ 111 Ins career.4 The women themselves, as immediate as
they are, appear freer of narrative context than before; the human
evocation is now in a broader, more absolute plane of existence.

It lias long been known that the image- of the two women depends
upon a photograph, perhaps taken in Tahiti about 1894 by either
Jules Agostini or Henri Lamasson (fig. 149)/' The- photograph was
111 the collection of Mine- Jolv-Segalen and was. in all likelihood,

found among Gauguin's effects in the House of Pleasure in Hiva Oa
( Marquesas Islands), which Victor Segalen visited just after Gau-
guin's death in 1903. There are at least two other documented cases
of Gauguin's use of photography for his works, quite aside from his
frequent pillaging of postcards and illustrations of old masters, his
French contemporaries, and objects and sculptures from Southeast
Asia and the South Pacific, which— despite or perhaps because of his
increasing isolation— led him to individual poses, compositions, and
expressive ideas.6 These photographs served— just as they had Ce-
zanne in his figural compositions — to distance Gauguin from the
changeable moment and perhaps the emotional distraction of his
models, and, ironically, to allow him to study the sitters with a more
literal directness.

In the Jolv-Segalen photograph, two women sit on the stoop of a
house, the younger one's mouth drawn down at the edges, her hand
firmly grasping the sinewy arm of her older companion. The
younger woman's stare into the camera has all the disquieting candor
typical of late-nineteenth-centurv slow-exposure photography, in
which transient expression is repressed into the sterner visage of a
held pose. The older woman is even more aloof, her head still and
unflinching in accord with the limitations of photographic record-
ing. In the painting, Gauguin cropped the image in half and adjusted
it into something quite different. The young woman's protectively
grasping hand is now laid gently over the forearm of the older
figure; her mouth is pulled up, giving her a contained and classically
elevated beauty. The older woman's left arm now leans with less
dependent weight on the lap of the other; her drawn-up knees, on
which her hands now cross serenely, are in the same plane as her
forearm and that of the young woman. Gauguin foreshortened her
thighs so emphatically that one hardly realizes that, as can be seen
with the aid of the photograph, the two women are actually seated.
Their physical and emotional relationship has been balanced in rela-
tion to that of the photograph, their union now affirmed by the
evenly spaced trees behind them, the whole scene stabilized and
united bv the continuous horizon. The appeal of the photograph for
Gauguin is readily apparent; what he made of it is something trans-
formingly grand and heroic.7

One also senses new, or renewed, awareness on the part of Gau-
guin of the traditions in European painting, which he, in part, ad-
dressed by taking up multifigured portraits. From his by then self-
confirmed, isolated perspective, he was engaged in ruminative
rethinking of that which went before in the history of painting.
Pinned to the wall of his studio before which he posed the model for
the photograph he used in creating Girl with the Fan of 1902 (Muse-
um Folkwang, Essen) there was an illustration of Hans Holbein the
Vounger's well-known Woman with Two Children from the Kunstmu-
seum Basel (then thought to be a portrait of the artist's family). It is
almost certainly this image to which Gauguin turned when painting
Mother and Two Children of 1901 (The Art Institute of Chicago),
reversing the positions of the children and in many ways neutralizing
the melancholy of the Holbein — essentially making it his own. With
this as a premise— compelled by the notion that just because of this
portrait's out-of-time quality— there may also be an earlier visual
source for it. One thinks of the equally famous Holbein double
portrait, then as now irr Dresden, of Thomas Godsalve and His Son
John, 1528 (fig. 150).8 There is, of course, much that is different
between the two— men versus women, three-quarter profile versus
full face— vet the half-length format, the two f igures drawn tightly to
the foreground, and above all the dignified examination of youth
and age, suggest a relationship. ((R

Vincent van Gogh

DUTCH, 1853-1890

The Bouquet, c. 1886

oil on canvas, 25v2 x 2l78 inches

In JULY 1886, Vincent's brother Theo van Gogh wrote to their
mother in Holland, reporting on the activities of Vincent, who had
joined him in Paris earlier that spring: "He is mainly painting flow-
ers—with the object to put a more lively colour into his next pictures.
He is also much more cheerful than in the past and people like him
here. To give you proof: hardly a day passes or he is asked to come to
the studios of wellknown painters, or they come to see him. He also
has acquaintances who give him a collection of flowers every week
which may serve him as models. If they are able to keep it up I think
his difficult times are over and he will be able to make it by himself."1
There survives a large group of pictures by Vincent of flowers in
vases, which can be dated to that summer and fall and which intro-
duce both a new vigor of handling into his art and an abundance of
color that previously had not existed in his dark and brooding realist
subjects painted in the North.2

This return to Paris3 by the thirty-three-year-old artist marks his
entry into the mainstream of French progressive painting, and it is
during this time, through his alert absorption of the divisionist tech-
niques of many of the artists whom he would see that year for the
first time, that he developed the foundations for the tremendously
vigorous and innovative work he would do over the next four years.
It was a time of rapid transition in his work,4 but also one that
allowed a reabsorption into painting of the recent past, underscor-
ing Van Gogh's true independence from his immediate artistic con-
text and calling to mind all the more strongly the revolution that he
was able to bring about in the short time remaining to him.

The Bouquet has long perplexed scholars as to its place within Van
Gogh's production. For some critics, it bears strong resemblances to
the flower pieces done in Paris,5 just as he was breaking away from
his dark, early manner and learning the pleasures of a heightened
palette and, ironically, turning to subjects that were less socially
charged than his earlier concerns. For others, it must date to the first
phase of his work in Aries,6 where he went in February 1888 to
escape the harsh Paris winter and perhaps to gain an independence
from the intensity of Parisian artistic activity, like his friend Gauguin
through his work in Pont-Aven and Martinique. It has even been
spe< ulated that the picture may have been done after his forced
retreat to the asylum of Saint-Remy, near Aries, in 1889,7 or as late as
the final stay at Auvers.8 All this conjecture can be supported to
some degree by comparisons with other flower pieces and still lifes;
no one conjecture is completely satisfying with the evidence as given.

A randomly gathered group of flowers is placed in a handled
pin her, with f ronds falling down around the base of the container
on the table. They have most often been identified as chrysanthe-
mums, which certainly would provide the great range of color in the
smaller blooms, although the strident reds and pinks of those blos-
soms 'ii tlx- (cutci just at the neck of the pitcher suggest the intro-
duction of another, softer, less autumnal variety. The petals are
painted with a sia< < ato directness and vigor— applied like ic ing by a

pastry chef— in an overall rhythm of even brightness, their intensity
of color further heightened by the dark blue that is pulled in and
around them and provides the ground color for the picture. The
constant animation of the surface is continued in the rapidly hatched
lines in green and earth red, which set off the bouquet in an aura of
moving paint strokes. Only the longer branches strewn around the
foreground are done with a more languorous and sustained drag of
the brush, as opposed to the very rapid execution of the flowers,
smaller leaves, and surrounding elements. It is an electric tour de
force of rapid execution; it is, perhaps, not surprising that for some
the picture must date to the end of Van Gogh's career at Saint-Remy
—the period of The Starry Night (fig. 161), when all elements within
the image partake in a surging animation.

Van Gogh must have been fully aware of the flower pieces by his
French contemporaries (for example, Theo owned Degas's famous
Woman with (Chrysanthemums [fig. 151] in 1887),9 but there is little here
to suggest the influence of Degas or Monet or Renoir, who also
excelled in this genre. The painting's source, to the degree that we
can point to one, is rather to an older style of painting, in all likeli-
hood the flower pictures of the painter from Marseille, Adolphe
Monticelli (1824-1886). Vincent first saw the work of Monticelli in
Paris at the dealer Delarebeyrette's in 1886.10 Monticelli's nonanalyti-
cal use of color, with highlights emerging without transition from a
dark background, appealed to him tremendously, even to the point
that he encouraged Theo to buy works by this still obscure painter.
They eventually, probably in joint ownership, acquired five oil paint-
ings, and Vincent frequently referred to Monticelli throughout his
correspondence over the next four years, even noting that one of his
reasons for abandoning Paris and establishing himself in Provence
was to draw closer to the southern world of Monticelli. The brothers
owned one flower picture by him (fig. 152), and its influence on
those of Van Gogh's flower series that are clearly documented to the
Paris period has long been noted; a comparison to this picture is
equally telling. The Monticelli has the same airless density as the Van
Gogh, the jabbed-on color contrasting, dark to light (without any
working out of complementary colors), all within a surface that is
covered with strokes of an equal degree of high impasto. The Monti-
celli image, with its suggestion of a cast shadow, is less intensely
realized than the Van Gogh, which is spatially more drawn to the
surface. Van Gogh's tabletop and the picture itself are dissolved in
the same hatched brushstrokes, giving the picture a more visionary,
less-witnessed quality in comparison to the Monticelli, yet in pictures
such as this by the older artist, Van Gogh found (as he would later in
the works of Delacroix) the release from both his earlier dark man-
ner and the more coloristically analytical paintings by his immediate
contemporaries, which laid the base for his further explorations.

Therefore, this suggests that The Bouquet be placed chronological-
ly back with Van Gogh's Paris production, perhaps to about the same
time in 1886 as the Bowl with Zinnias (fig. 153)," which contains the
same vigorous cross-hatching in high impasto, with a similar disin-
terest in modeled forms, features that would be reasserted in the
flower pieces done later in the Paris period. However, this observa-
tion is made with the recognition that while there is nothing within
the earliest group of flower pictures to match the emotional inten-
sity displayed in the execution here, such complete absorption in the
painting of f lowers would not reappear in Van Gogh's work until he
encountered the sunf lowers of Provence in Aries.

]()()

Vincent van Gogh

DUTCH, 1853-1890

La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle), 18 8 g

OIL ON CANVAS, 3 6 '/a X 29 INCHES

Vincent van Gogh painted five images of Mme Roulin as "La
Berceuse," the woman seated before a brilliant, floral wallpaper,
holding the rope by which she rocks the cradle of her newborn
daughter.1 Thev bridge in time the terrible breakdown of December
23, 1888, when Vincent, seemingly enraged by Gauguin to the point
of complete madness, mutilated his left ear and retreated to his room
in the "vellow house" in Aries to die. They stand, together with the
series of vertical sunflowers with which this image is so intimately
connected, among his grandest and most powerful achievements.
His intention was to go well beyond the conventions of contempo-
rary portraiture and the symbolically associative figural images
painted by his friends Emile Bernard and Gauguin. "La Berceuse:
that gigantic and inspired image like a popular print"2 was what
Albert Aurier, the first critic to take serious note of Van Gogh (and
his only substantial commentator during his brief lifetime), called it.

Augustine-Alix-Pellicot Roulin (1851-1930) was thirty-seven years
old when she met Van Gogh through her husband Joseph, the post-
master at the railroad station in Aries near Vincent's house. As so
poignantly evidenced in the frequent letters that Vincent wrote to
his brother Theo in Paris, Joseph Roulin, a hard-drinking, outspo-
ken republican, was the one person with whom Vincent struck up a
substantial friendship during his fifteen-month stay in the provincial
city. Starting in the fall of 1888, Vincent painted numerous portraits
oi the postman and all the members of his family (see figs. 154 and
I",",). He also incorporated the couple into two of his imaginary,
multifigured compositions.3 Roulin's tall, spare figure, in appear-
ance more Russian than French, as Vincent noted,4 held great ap-
peal; the seeming peace of his marriage, exemplary in the manner of
his own parents,5 provided a kind of solace for Vincent that was hard
sought in his isolation, both physical and psychological. The family
also provided ready models for him and Gauguin in a city where
sitters were difficult to find and rarely sympathetic once they began

to pose for him; he lamented, "I despair of ever finding models."6

Much has been written about the relationship between Van Gogh
and this woman. By her own confession7 she was frightened to pose
for him, particularly after her husband was transferred to Marseille
on January 22, 1889. His departure came as a great blow to Vincent,
who by then depended heavily upon his companionship. However,
there is no weariness apparent in any of the portraits he made of her
and her children, and it has often been overlooked that it was Augus-
tine Roulin who was the first to visit Vincent in the hospital on
Christmas day of 1888, after his savage breakdown. She continued
to pose for him during the period of his convalescence when his head
was wrapped in bandages, although the neighbors around the place
Lamartine petitioned to have Vincent confined following his break-
down. For him she became a kind of Great Mother, her heavy figure
and still features embodying for him the solace of calm hope.

His thoughts on Mme Roulin, or rather the allegorical portrait he
would do of her as "La Berceuse"— a phrase to be translated as either
the lullaby or the rocker, in reference to the unseen cradle that she
rocks — can be followed through his correspondence with Theo. The
work's first overriding evocation is that of a spiritual image that
would bring a lulling calm to those in distress, and in a letter proba-
bly written on January 28, 1888, he related the idea he had "to paint
a picture in such a way that sailors, who are at once children and
martyrs, seeing it in the cabin of their Icelandic fishing boat, would
feel the old sense of being rocked come over them and remember
their own lullabys."8 Despite the somewhat incoherent passage in
which this idea is introduced (a rare incidence, in fact, since Vincent's
letters are remarkably clear-headed and self-analytical, even when he
was at his most endangered), it makes direct reference to the novel
Pecheur d'Islande by Pierre Loti, which he had recently read and
discussed with Gauguin. The text deals with the dreadfully lonely
and despairing life of Breton sailors in the waters off Iceland, and
Vincent was deeply impressed that Gauguin had himself been a
sailor,9 although his claim to having been to Iceland seems to fall
w ithin one of Gauguin's many self-aggrandizing exaggerations. The
idea of making "La Berceuse" into a votive image like a popular
chromolithograph, to which Van Gogh so often referred in connec-
tion with it, remained with him. In a letter to Theo attributed to May
25, 1889, he proposed that if one arranged "La Berceuse" in the
middle and the two canvases of sunflowers to the right and left, "it
makes a sort of triptych ... a sort of decoration, for instance for the

102

end of a ship's cabin" (see fig. 156). 10 Immediately, however, he added
a stylistic note — "Then, as the size increases, the concise composition
is justified" — which reveals that his concern with the arrangement
was as much formal as it was expressive. At another point he gave an
expanded idea of the possible relationship between "La Berceuse"
and the series of sunflowers: "I picture to myself these same canvases
[replicas of "La Berceuse"] between those of the sunflowers, which
would thus form torches or candelabra beside them, the same size,
and so the whole would be composed of seven or nine canvases.""
The idea of series had already emerged before in the repetitions of
the sunflowers (see fig. 157) he made to decorate the room of the
yellow house in anticipation of Gauguin's visit. His introduction of a
painting of Mme Roulin into a serial conception is certainly based on
his carefully considered interplay of a palette of ocher and sharp
green, although the association of her image, flanked by two vases of
flowers, like a Madonna on an altar between floral offerings, is justly
inevitable, particularly given what is known of the potency of both
images for Van Gogh.

The first mentions of "La Berceuse," in two letters to Theo and
one to the Dutch painter Arnold Hendrik Koning, date from Jan-
uary 1889. To Theo he wrote: "I am working on the portrait of
Roulin's wife, which I was working on before I was ill,"12 and "I think I
have already told you that besides these [replicas of sunflowers] I
have a canvas of 'La Berceuse' the very one I was working on when
tny illness interrupted me. I now have two copies of this one too."13 In
the letter to Koning acknowledging his New Year's greetings, he
informed his friend: 'At present I have in mind, or rather on my
easel, the portrait of a woman. I call it 'La Berceuse,' or as we say in
Dutch (after Van Eeden, you know, who wrote that particular book I
gave you to read), or in Van Eeden's Dutch, quite simply 'our lullaby
or the woman rocking the cradle.' It is a woman in a green dress (the
bust olive green and the skirt pale malachite green). The hair is quite
orange and in plaits. The complexion is chrome yellow, worked up
with some naturally broken tones for the purpose of modeling. The
hands holding the rope of the cradle, the same. At the bottom the
I).k kground is vermilion (simply representing a tiled floor or else a
stone floor). The wall is covered with wallpaper, which of course I
have calculated in conformity with the rest of the colors. This wall-
paper is bluish-green with pink dahlias spotted with orange and

ultramarine Whether I really sang a lullaby in colors is something

I leave to the critics."14

The emotional letters to Theo about the image contrast sharply
with the careful, stylistic description given to Koning, and show the
flif hototm between mind and feelings that this image held for Van

Gogh. The bias to see in the paintings products of an inspired
madness is here more strongly refuted than in any other of his most
"loaded" images; the equilibrium of a formal composition, a stylistic
intention, and a narrative expression are brought into perfect
accord.

The five versions of "La Berceuse" mentioned in the letters sur-
vive,15 and this one was the canvas chosen by Mme Roulin for her
own out of those that had been done up to that time— an intelligent
choice, according to Vincent's appraisal: "She had a good eye and
took the best."16 (The painting did not remain with the family long,
for it was sold in 1895, along with four other Van Gogh portraits of
members of the family, to the Parisian dealer Ambroise Vollard.)17

Because of its documented early history, this painting has always
been considered as possibly the first, or primary, version of "La
Berceuse" (as an alternative to that in Otterlo; fig. 158), which was
begun before Vincent's collapse in December, probably in the com-
pany of Gauguin, who also painted a portrait of Mme Roulin seated
in a similar chair at that time.18 However, the primacy of neither
version can be established with certainty. Both have the date 1889 on
the arm of the chair, but the placement of the hands is unique in this
version, while the wallpaper in the Otterlo painting is more robust
and animated than in any of the others. As early as January 28,
Vincent reported to Theo in a letter that he was making copies of
the painting destined for the Roulin family, a document that strongly
supports its preeminence in the series. This picture must have served
as the model for the other three paintings, which, with one excep-
tion, follow it in fairly precise detail, including the wallpaper design.
Mark Roskill has pointed out that the secondary motif of the wall-
paper, not the flowers themselves but the paisleyiike orange curves
within red dots on a green field, recurs in the background of the
portrait of Dr. Felix Rev (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Mos-
cow), the physician who so sympathetically saw Van Gogh through
the December- January crisis and whose portrait he referred to in
the letters written in late January.19 However, this same motif occurs
as well in the Otterlo version and seems simply to have been much on
Van Gogh's mind before and after Christmas. The strongest argu-
ment in favor of the Annenberg painting as the first is its one major
dif ference from the other four, namely, the position of the woman's
hands, which here cross right over left, just the reverse of the others.
What has been overlooked is that by doing so, Mme Roulin covers
her wedding band in the early version, while the ring is prominently
shown in the others. The significance of this detail— as profound as
the distinction may be— is obscure. Her dual role as mother and wife
is interlocked throughout Van Gogh's discussions of the subject. It

in J

might be proposed that he painted her first in the pose that came
most naturally (right hand over left) and then realized that by shift-
ing her hands in the four subsequent versions of the picture, he
could reveal her ring and pav tribute to her role as wife, in a mar-
riage that he so much admired, while the cradle rope emphasizes her
role as mother.20

On quite another level — and certainlv a subjective one — there are
in this picture a power and a deliberateness of both characterization
and monumental realization absent from the other four. The abso-
lute set of the head, the deliberateness of the gaze, and the complete-
ly assured execution of the deep blue outline of bodice and chair
place it somewhat apart from the others, although it must be empha-
sized that repetition of images within a series did not necessarily
entail a diminishment of energy and strength of execution.

Should this in fact be the first version, whose execution would
then have been interrupted by his illness, one might expect to find
physical evidence, and there is some indication of a distinct time
lapse within certain sections. The area of the green skirt that ex-
tends beyond the arm of the chair, for example, is worked in quite a
different manner from the rest of the skirt. The rope that passes
through her hand lacks the directional tautness that occurs in the
other versions and may be reworked in the left part, modeled over a
salmon base with strokes of vellow, lavender, and a little green, the
whole braided together by the red outline, whereas the right section
is painted directly on the green of the skirt with no base color.

In the end, whatever relationship this picture has to the others,
they, individually and as a series, all have a nobility consistent with
Van Gogh's ambitions: "Perhaps there's an attempt to get all the musk
of the color here into 'La Berceuse'."21 As he confided to Theo, he
wished that this image— bluntly executed in harsh and defiant out-
lines in radiant color— would have an immediacy and popular appeal
that would recall his earlier populist and socially conscious works.
Few pictures concerned him as much in his letters as this, and per-
haps more is known from the correspondence about his expressive
intention here than in any other work. He was apprehensive at times
about it: "But as I have told you already, this canvas may be unintelli-
gible."22 Yet he also seemed to have realized the magnitude of his
success: "I know very well that it is neither drawn nor painted as
correctly as a Bouguereau, and I rather regret this, because I have
an earnest desire to be correct. But though it is doomed, alas, to be
neither a Cabanel nor a Bouguereau, yet I hope that it will be
French."23

JJR

Vincent van Gogh

DUTCH, 1853-1890

Olive TkEES: Pale Blue Sky, 1889

OIL ON CANVAS, 28V8 X <$6l/4 INCHES

Upon Van Gogh's arrival at the asylum at Saint-Remy in the
spring of 1889, the olive trees that grew in cultivated groves near
the walls of the sanitarium took on a special meaning for him. They,
even more than the dense, wavering cypresses, which would also
provide him with the subjects of some of his greatest works during
that period, became identified for him with the South and all those
things that endure and thrive in intense sunlight. A group of three
canvases showing these orchards, all from a point of view angled
slightly down into the groves, date from that May and June and were
sent to his brother Theo.1 In late November he reported to Theo
that he had been "knocking about in the orchards, and the result is
five size 30 canvases, which along with the three studies of olives
that you have, at least constitute an attack on the problem."2

In the interval Van Gogh had suffered one of his worst bouts,
seemingly prompted by a visit back to Aries on July 14. He was
confined to his rooms in the sanitarium for over two months. This
second group of five pictures was the first theme to which he re-
turned in the late autumn when he felt secure enough to venture
outside again. The sequence of execution within the five canvases
remains unclear. None, as opposed to earlier groupings such as the
sunflowers or those of a woman rocking a cradle (p. 103), is a replica
or variant copy of another; each seems both compositionally and
coloristicallv to have provided him with a different way to address his
ideas on the subject with a new urgency, which, by the fall, had
become even more important for him.

Part of his intention in the early winter group of olive-grove paint-
ings was to directly address the abstractions that he felt were deflect-
ing the talents of his friends Gauguin and Emile Bernard, the latter
having sent to him a photograph that fall of a picture of Christ in the
Garden of Olives (fig. 159),3 a subject that Gauguin had done the
same summer and written about to Van Gogh (fig. 160). 4 Vincent,
who so often had followed with poignant sympathy and tolerance the
work of his fellow-painters, was outraged: "The thing is that this
month 1 have been working in the olive groves, because their Christs
in the Garden, with nothing really observed, have gotten on my
nerves. Of course with me there is no question of doing anything
from the Bible— and I have written to Bernard and Gauguin too that
I considered that our duty is thinking, not dreaming, so that when
looking at their work I was astonished at their letting themselves go
like that.... It is not that it leaves me cold, but it gives me a painful

feeling of collapse instead of progress What I have done is a rather

hard and coarse reality beside their abstractions, but it will have a
rustic quality, and will smell of the earth."5 In his pictures of olive
groves he was true to his intention: he addressed his subject with a
renewed energy of execution and analytical observation of color
variations that are remarkable, particularly in contrast to the views
of cypresses such as The Starry Night (fig. 161), which allowed him a
visionary intensity that, arguably, far exceeds the power of "dream-
ing" in those religious narratives of Bernard or Gauguin.

"The olive trees are very characteristic, and I am struggling to
catch them. They are old silver, sometimes with more blue in them,

sometimes greenish, bronzed, fading white above a soil which is
yellow, pink, violet-tinted or orange, to dull red ocher. Very difficult
though, very difficult. But that suits me and induces me to work
wholly in gold or silver. And perhaps one day I shall do a personal
impression of them like what the sunflowers were for the yellows."6
He never proceeded with this train of thought: to do a series as with
the sunflowers. Each of the five pictures of olive groves varies con-
siderably from one another to the point that they may be, in fact,
different orchards or seen from very different points of view. In
turn, the sky and quality of light range greatly within them; one is
dominated by a great sun disk (fig. 162), while in all the others the
sun is behind the artist's easel. However, they are consistent in their
quick staccato application of paint, which is laid on with a controlled
analytical placement of contrasted colors that suggests Van Gogh's
interest in the formal theories of Seurat, whom Vincent met at least
once in Paris in 1888 and whose pictures greatly impressed him.7

In Olive Trees, the pointilistically executed sky— strokes of blue,
pink, yellow, and a sharp aqua laid with masterful integration over
the white ground— gently holds its own with the mass of trees be-
neath, whose trunks are defined by alternating strokes of tightly
keyed alizarin and brick red, which, like the more contrasted dark
green, light pink, and pale green of the leaves, continues the anima-
tion of the sky, without a loss of definition of the masses. The more
broadly worked strokes of the earth are done in alizarin, purple, and
a peach tone over a ground that has been unified by a light coat of
pink brow n to indicate what appears to be the furrows newly plowed
for winter planting, creating islands of soil banked around the roots
of the trees. The effect of unity and spatial integration of sky, trees,
and earth is so great that the slow realization of the two repoussoir
shadows in purple on each side, cast by trees behind us, seems almost
disruptive in a slightly sinister way.

For some viewers, the olive trees, and particularly these pictures
from the early winter, are imbued with the emotionally frail state of
the artist. However, at least here, the quality of nature charged by
the artist's emotion seems distinctly absent, and one is more aware of
the pensive and highly lucid revelation of the coloristic variations
possible within this theme. The landscape of the South was as much a
resource for Van Gogh's analytical thought as it was a potential
embodiment of his subjective and often pantheistic vision. "It is
really my opinion more and more ...if you work diligently from
nature without saying to yourself beforehand — 'I want to do this or
that,' if you work as if you were making a pair of shoes, without
artistic preoccupations, you will not always do well, but the days you
least expect it, you find a subject which holds its own with the work of
those who have gone before. You learn to know a country which is
basically quite different from what it appears at first sight."8

Following the worst bout of mental collapse that Van Gogh is
known to have suffered during his short life, he seems to have re-
entered his work with a control and a formal sense of invention that
extended his work to still another plane. In this, as is evidenced by
his letters, the olive trees, along with the coloristic variations they
allowed him in the clear winter light, must have taken on not the
expressionistic associations that the gnarled branches have suggest-
ed to many, but a relationship with something very tenacious, an-
cient, and of the place, these groves that were so carefully husband-
ed and cultivated by people who, for Vincent, represented a kind of
continuity and persistence that, at least for a moment in time, he,
too, was able to achieve.

JJR

107

Vincent van Gogh

DUTCH, 1853-1890

Women Picking Olives, 1889-90
oil on canvas, 28v2 x 35'3/i6 inches

During the latter part of 1889 Van Gogh's thoughts were full
of the pastoral paintings of Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) and
Millet (1814-1875), who humbled him by their achievement— that
Frenchness to which he so often referred as threatening him, with
his "Northern brains," with artistic impotence1— and also spurred
him on: "I did not want to leave things alone entirely, without making
an effort, but it is restricted to the expression of two things — the
cypresses — the olive trees — let others who are better and more pow-
erful than I reveal their symbolic language."2 Such ruminations
prompted him to ask, in the same letter: "Who are the human beings
that actually live among the olive, the orange, the lemon orchards?
The peasant there is different from the inhabitant of Millet's wide
wheat fields. But Millet has reawakened our thoughts so that we can
see the dweller in nature. But until now no one has painted the real
Southern Frenchman for us. But when Chavannes or someone else
shows us that human being, we shall be reminded of those words,
ancient but with a blissfully new significance, Blessed are the poor in
spirit, blessed are the pure of heart, words that have such a wide
purport that we, educated in the old, confused and battered cities of
the North, are compelled to stop at a great distance from the thresh-
old of those dwellings. And however deeply convinced we may be of
Rembrandt's v ision, yet we must ask ourselves: And did Raphael have
this in mind, and Michelangelo, and da Vinci? This I do not know,
but I believe that Giotto, who was less of a heathen, felt it more
deeply— that great sufferer, who remains as familiar to us as a con-
temporary."3

These thoughts, just as it was becoming difficult to work outside,
seem to have prompted in December and early January 1889-90, a
third group of olive-grove pictures— three in number (this picture,
one in Washington, DC. [fig. 163], and one now in Lausanne)— all
involving three figures helping one another pick the olives.4 "I am

working on a picture this moment, women gathering olives These

,h c tin- < oloi s: the ground is violet, and farther off, yellow ocher; the
olives with bronze trunks have gray-green foliage, the sky is entirely

pink, and three small figures pink too " 5 Just before Christmas

1 De< embei the anniversary of his collapse in Aries), he wrote to
his mother in Holland: "I hope Theo has sent you my studies, but I
started still another rather big picture for you of women gathering
olives. I lie 1 1 ees, grav-green, with a pink sky and a purplish soil — 1
had hoped to send it one of these days, but it is drying slowly."6 That
same day he wrote to his sister, who lived with his mother: "I hope
you will like the canvas for you and Mother which I am working on at
present a little. It is a repetition of a picture for Theo, women
gathering olives."7 It seems likely that this picture is the same as the
one mentioned December 15; by January 3 he was already sending

to Theo in Paris "The Women Gathering Olives'— I had intended
this picture for Mother and sister, ... I also have a copy of it for you,
and the study (more colored, with deeper tones) from nature."8

The following day, January 4, he wrote to his sister as well, noting
that he had sent a number of pictures to Paris the day before: "I
designated the one with the olive trees for you and Mother. You will
see, I think, that in a white frame it will take on a mild color, meaning
the contrast between pink and green."9

Because the early provenance of the other two pictures of olive
groves begins with Theo's widow, by process of elimination it seems
most likely that the present painting is, indeed, the one sent to his
mother and sister. Which of the other two is, in fact, the study done
"from nature," continues to be unclear.10 The pictures of women
picking olives form a series in a stricter sense than the five olive
groves that immediately preceded them (see p. 106). The three
compositions are nearly identical and their palettes very similar, to
the point that the "deeper tones" Vincent mentioned are difficult to
identify with either of the two that stayed with Theo. In turn, all
three have a modulated quality and a certain paleness that sets them
quite aside from the five earlier olive groves. In this Vincent was
making a very conscious stylistic distinction, perhaps remembering
just as he would for the figurative subjects themselves, the cool
harmonious pictures of Puvis, which, for Vincent, had restraint and
equilibrium, a quality of "a strange and providential meeting of very
far-off antiquities and crude modernity."" It is in this spirit that he
referred perhaps to the present picture, "done from memory after
the study of the same size made on the spot, because I want some-
thing very far away, like a vague memory softened by time."12 He was
attempting a specific effect: 'All the colors are softer than usual."13
And he was fully aware that the effect was certainly much less imme-
diate and more subtle than many works that preceded it. To his sister
he wrote: "I hope that the picture of the women in the orchard of
olive trees will be a little to your liking— I sent a drawing of it to
Gauguin a few days ago, and he told me that he thinks it good, and he
knows my work well and would not hesitate to say so if he thought
there was nothing in it. Of course you are quite free to choose
another one to replace it if you like, but I dare believe that you will
come back to this one in the long run."14

For all our associations of energy, high emotional expression, and
serene magnitude felt before the works of Van Gogh, there is a
quality here that is rare in his work— a lyricism and true charm in
tonalities, with a nearly sentimental pleasure taken (as by many
artists within the pastoral tradition) from the women's shared gath-
ering of the fruits. Quite like his hero Puvis, it was a sense of far
distant permanence, that quality of "something a little studied" that
he mentioned in his letters.15

The state of the paint surface is exceptionally well preserved here.
The gently lifted impasto survives wonderfully, and his rubbing
down of certain sections of the prepared ground to vary his surface,
subtly modulating the overall spatial effect, is immediately apparent.
Van Gogh wrote, "I think that probably I shall hardly do any more
things in impasto; it is the result of the quiet, secluded life that I am
leading, and I am all the better for it. Fundamentally I am not so
violent as all that, and at last I myself fed calmer."16

LO8

Vincent van Gogh

DUTCH, 1853-1890

Vase of Roses, 1890

oil on canvas, 36^/8 x 29'/s inches

o n May 13, 1890, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo from the
asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Remy, reporting that he
had finished another canvas of "pink roses against a yellow-green
background in a green vase."1 It was his last letter from the South,
where he had gone in 1889, full of the hope that his isolation from
Paris would give him the calm to practice his art and the new per-
spective he so badly needed. The letter continues: "I tell you, I feel
my head is absolutely calm for my work, and the brush strokes come
to me and follow each other logically." Dr. Theophile-Zacharie-
Auguste Peyron, who had supervised his care so attentively in the
cloister-made-hospital, reviewed the state of his patient three days
later, the day Vincent departed for Paris: "The patient, though calm
most of the time, has had several attacks during his stay in the
establishment which have lasted from two weeks to one month. Dur-
ing these attacks the patient was subject to frightful terrors and tried
several times to poison himself, either by swallowing the paints which
he used for his work or by drinking kerosene which he managed to
steal from the attendant while the latter refilled his lamps. His last fit
broke out after a trip which he undertook to Aries, and lasted about
two months. Between his attacks the patient was perfectly quiet and
devoted himself with ardor to his painting. Today he is asking for his
release to live in the North of France, hoping that its climate will be
favorable." In the column headed "Observations," Peyron noted
"cured."2

In few of Van Gogh's works are his own self-analysis and that of his
doctor so profoundly confirmed as in Vase of Roses. It is, for all its
grandeur, a work of consummate calm and easily achieved splendor.
Nothing of the distraught nature of the artist's mind or of his intense
vision is evident here. An abundant bouquet of roses in a green
faience jar is placed firmly in the center of a pink table against a
green background. The elegantly drawn stems seem to be thornless;
the weighty blooms are laid on with a rich fluidity, many of them
edged with a color that ranges, in the central section, to quick, wet
strokes of deep alizarin, while others, particularly on the upper right,
are outlined with penlike fineness in blue. The fluency of the execu-
tion is no better revealed than in the fallen leaves and bloom on the
table, the left cluster made up of eight swift strokes, the right, nine-
teen.

The picture immediately recalls the series of seven upright sun-
flower paintings done about a year before,3 with their great, ranging
stalks filling the entire picture (see fig. 157). They are the gold of the
South that Vincent wished to celebrate when he forced himself to
attain the "high yellow note"4 in what he often referred to as his most
visionary and strained moments of execution. Yet nothing could be
more in contrast than the dry, angular sunflowers and the moist
sensuality of early summer portrayed in Vase of Roses. The heroic
stridence of the sunflower pictures has resolved itself into a more
gentle realization and even acceptance of beauty in confronting the

subject. As with the Women Picking Olives (p. 108), Van Gogh has
come to a peaceful resolution with a more subdued palette, dimin-
ished impasto, and, one thinks, increased pleasure of applying paint
in a way completely harmonious with the loveliness of his subject. It is
remarkable that a painter of such a short career could bring himself
through a cycle of almost unrelenting intensity into a calm maturity,
particularly during his three brief years in the South. Even so, some
three months after executing this picture, he would fall victim once
more to his psychic disease— this time, in Auvers-sur-Oise— and suc-
ceed in his attempt to destroy himself.

Just after leaving Saint-Remy he spoke several times to his brother
and mother of the wonderful surge of activity that marked his final
days at the asylum: And those last days at St. Remy I still worked as in
a frenzy. Great bunches of flowers, violet irises, big bouquets of

roses "5 There are eleven pictures that can be dated between the

end of April and his departure on May 16; this was an almost super-
human achievement.6 The paintings were still too wet to pack at the
time of his departure, and he left them behind in the safekeeping of
Dr. Peyron, who dutifully shipped them off to Auvers, where they
arrived at the end of June;7 he received them in a much less settled
state of mind than when he had executed them only a month before.

Among this group are four flower still lifes: two of irises, one
horizontal and one vertical, and two of roses, which differ in format
in the same way.8 The horizontal picture of roses, now in a private
collection, was described by Van Gogh to Theo as "a canvas of roses
with a light green background."10 The vertical picture is Vase of Roses,
which he mentioned as being in process the day after." "The
bunches of flowers themselves are different, the ones in the vertical
Vase of Roses simply being taller and more full of buds. The vase in
the horizontal picture of roses is an unglazed earthenware jar with a
handle, the one here is more upright, a green faience vase, seemingly
the green vase mentioned in his May 13 letter.

Van Gogh varyingly described the roses he was painting as pink
and white or simply (in the May 13 letter) pink. One can see by the
edges of the pink tabletop of the Annenberg picture, which have
been protected from light by the frame, that the pigment in the
roses has faded to a distinctly paler tone. Also judging from the
protected edges, the same shift can be found in what is undoubtedly
the same pigment used for the background of the Irises (The Metro-
politan Museum of Art, New York), although there perhaps to a
more radical degree. This is a frequent occurrence in Van Gogh's
paintings. However, close examination of the roses in the Annen-
berg picture reveals that, particularly in the lower areas of brush-
strokes, which have been literally shaded by passages of impasto, the
original, more heightened, pink does survive. Alerted by this in
attempting to visualize the original harmony, one sees clearly that
the flowers here must always have been, as they still very much are, a
subtle blending of pink and white, outlined with the same brush in
green. The description of this picture as "white roses" in 1908 sug-
gests that this shift in pigment occurred quite early.12

There would be moments during the next three months in Auvers
when Van Gogh would regain, particularly in figure subjects, the
sense of scale he had achieved those last days in Saint-Remy. How-
ever, Vase of Roses truly marks for the last time the completely re-
solved and untroubled manner declared by the letters: the logic, the
calm, the "steadv enthusiasm."13

111

Edouard Vuillard

FRENCH, 1868-1940

The Album, 1895

OIL ON CANVAS, 26ll/i6 X 8o'/2 INCHES

In the center, a group of three women on a canape examine an
open album. Another woman, on the right, arranges flowers; two
others group themselves on the left; the seventh is situated at the
edge near the frame. It is appropriate for this painting, and the
others with which it forms an ensemble (five in total), to make an
observation that applies, no less than before, to all the works of this
artist and the best of his contemporaries — namely, that the design, or
rather the definition of the objects, possesses in the paintings only
the plastic value of an arabesque. The pleasure of naming these
objects undoubtedly intervenes in that which is given by the images,
but this is hardly the point. Its real essence is abstract. The general
effect is of red and green enlivened with yellow. These are basically
woven together in the background in narrow, juxtaposed strokes, yet
they emanate throughout the picture with the subtlest of variations,
the reds descending sometimes almost to browns and blacks, at other
moments lifting to vermilion and tones of rose. The yellow is some-
limes muted nearly to beige. The color at times is divided into small,
isolated touches, in other passages it is gathered into delicately mod-
ulated masses. The contrast between those two processes is brought
to its height at the center. "'

This evocative and loving description of The Album was given by its
owner, Thadee Natanson, in 1908, when he was forced to sell it,
along with much of his collection. (The sale contained twenty other
works by the painter, as well as splendid examples of Delacroix,
( < /anne, Seurat, K.-X. Roussel, and Bonnard). Few people were
better suited to address the subtly intimate yet grandly realized

achievement of Vuillard. Since 1891 Natanson had been the editor
and publisher, with His two brothers, of the progressive and lively
Parisian journal La Revue Blanche. Along with music criticism by
Claude Debussy and sports by Leon Blum, it had frequent contribu-
tions from Stephane Mallarme and the young Andre Gide. For elev-
en years La Revue Blanche was, as John Russell has noted, simply "the
best periodical of its kind that has ever been published."2 Many of
the artists who designed its frontispieces— Vuillard and Bonnard
among them— formed an alliance. When they first showed together
in the shop of Le Bare de Boutteville in 1891, they called themselves
the Nabis, from the Hebrew word for prophet, at the suggestion of
one of their members, Paul Serusier. In contrast to the Impression-
ists some two decades earlier, much of their formulation was theoret-
ical, based on the premise that visual reality is only a beginning for
art, which then, through poetic, symbolic, and formal processes,
would lead to more general and profound revelations. Gauguin, with
whom Serusier studied at Pont-Aven, was their central hero. The
evocative and finely wrought poetry of Mallarme and the seamless
music of Debussy are often recognized as their nonvisual equiva-
lents. Some, such as Maurice Denis, who eventually gave himself over
completely to criticism, or Henri Ibels (seep. 64), who never quite
left the world of illustrated journalism, soon wandered from the
initial premise of the group. Others— most importantly Bonnard
and Vuillard— were nurtured by the liberating theories of the Nabis
and pursued a new goal: to create art that was suggestive rather than
declarative, sensuous rather than descriptive, and, perhaps most im-
portantly, decorative in the sense of harmonious unification and
continuous rather than objectively illusionistic. It is in the true spirit
of these intentions that Natanson described Vuillard's pictures.

One of the central tenets of the Nabis— albeit a principle not
followed consistently by any of their members — was the abandon-
ment of the conventional paintings so firmly linked with the Parisian
bourgeois collectors who had provided the first audience for the
Impressionists. The young critic Albert Aurier, chief spokesman for
the Nabis, stated in 1891: "Painting can only have been created to
decorate with thoughts, dreams and ideas the blank walls of human

1 1 2

buildings. The easel picture is nothing but an illogical refinement
invented to satisfy the fancy of the commercial spirit of decadent
civilizations."3 The Dutch Nabi painter Jan Verkade (1868-1946)
recalled that a war cry went up in the early 1890s: "No more easel
pictures! Away with useless bits of furniture! Painting must not usurp
a freedom which cuts it off from the other arts! The painter's work
begins where the architect decides that his work is finished! . . There
are no such things as pictures, there is only decoration."4 And if the
Nabis regretted that Gauguin was rarely allowed the opportunity to
work on a large decorative scale, the grand public murals of Puvis de
Chavannes (1824-1898) were there to lead them.

Of course, the abandonment of easel painting was not an absolute
principle for Vuillard, who, unlike many of his Nabi colleagues,
avoided generalized theories and formulations; many of his most
beautiful works in the 1890s were remarkably fine, small panels (fig.
164). Yet, starting in the early nineties with the stage flats he exe-
cuted for his schoolfellow friend Aurelien Lugne-Poe,5 he began
working on a large decorative scale that would bring Aurier's theo-
retical postulations to an enchantingly seductive reality in a series of
closely interconnected private commissions.6 The first commission
came from a cousin of the Natansons, Desmarais, in 1892, for six
long horizontals and a folding screen to decorate his study. The
themes, as they nearly always would be for Vuilllard, were drawn
from the gentlest and most untroubled of domestic genres — women
gardening, children playing with a dog, a dressmaker's shop like the
one run by Vuillard's mother.7 Following the success of these, Tha-
dee Natansons older brother Alexandre requested a more ambitious
series of nine large, upright panels depicting children and nurse-
maids in the public gardens of Paris (fig. 165). Although they were in
their original positions for a short time, these two series, like those
done later in the 1890s for Claude Anet and Dr. Vasquez, seem to
have been carefully calculated to make a complete decorative
scheme. It is this quality that Paul Signac noted in 1898: "What is
especially noteworthy about these two panels is the clever way in
which they fit into the decoration of the room. The painter took his
key from the dominant colors of the furniture and the draperies,
repeating them in his canvases and harmonizing them with their

complementaries Truly, these panels do not look like paintings: it

is as if all the colors of the material and carpets had been concentrat-
ed here, in the corner of this wall, and been resolved into handsome
shapes and perfect rhythms. From that viewpoint the work is abso-
luteiy successful, and it is the first time that I have received this
impression from a modern interior."8

The works commissioned by Thadee seem to have been more
loosely considered in this sense, as unified as they are in color and
( (imposition. Three, including The Album, are extended horizontals
(fig. 168),9 one a large vertical (fig. 166), and the fifth, a rectangle of
an easel scale (fig. 167). Although it is difficult to speculate on their
original arrangement, all have one dimension in common. Vuillard
himself confirmed the unity of the five apart from all the other
works done by him for the Natansons: in a personal chronology he
drew up after the turn of the century, he simply noted in the listings
for 1895, "The panels done for Thadee; December."10

The Natansons' apartment on the rue Florentin, just off the place
de la Concorde, was one of Vuillard's favorite haunts throughout the

nineties. Thadee's wife, the high-spirited Misia Godebska," was,
after his mother, the central figure in his life, their relationship
summarized as allowing "the security and assurance of a perfect
understanding."12 Many of his most enchanting small paintings of
this period document the richly patterned interiors of their apart-
ment (fig. 169)— nearly always shown at night with the large rooms
pooled with light from heavily shaded lamps. One of the 1895 series,
Conversation (Pot de gres), appears in the background of his Misia,
Vallotton, and Thadee Natanson (fig. 170). Another, Embroidering by the
Window (fig. 166), appears in an undated photograph of Misia, and,
like Conversation, it is seemingly unframed (or surrounded with sim-
ple molding) and placed on a strongly patterned wallpaper.13 The
Album appears behind Misia in the Karlsruhe interior of c. 1897 (fig.

171) ; she is shown playing the piano while her brother, the comic
Cipa Godebska, listens intently. But clearly the placement of this
work was hardly sacred, since it reappears in a photograph of a
billiard room with Thadee and his sister-in-law Ida Godebska (fig.

172) . 14 It is therefore difficult to speak of these five works precisely as
a decorative series in comparison with others; yet it is because of
Thadee's own description of them as an "ensemble" that we must
acknowledge Vuillard's careful consideration of them as a harmoni-
ous pictorial unit. They also share a sustained evenness of psycho-
logical unity: young women in striped blouses setting about their
leisurely, civilized tasks within richly textured interiors, with the
continuous presence of flowers — all of them autumnal chrysanthe-
mums—in a tonality underscoring the essential palette of all five
works.

Everything is subdued and peaceful. The elegant full-bosomed
women— all perhaps variants of his friend and patron, Misia — are
literally fused in the most serene way with their surroundings. Their
charming, patterned day dresses, observed in chic understatement
with the attention one would expect from a dressmaker's son, play
counterpoint to the room and its objects: the plane of the printed
mutton-chop blouse of the central figure in profile is juxtaposed
with the marbleized cover of the album; the suspenders of the figure
arranging flowers on the right wittily play off the striped red fabric
of the overstuffed chair beyond. The women exist, as do all the
other women in the series, in a slightly hermetic world of domestic
ease and leisure that echoes seventeenth-century Dutch genre pic-
tures, the light seeming at first to come from some unknown source
near the center and then to be suffused throughout the whole com-
position. But if the light is that quality of still radiance so loved in
Vermeer's pictures and extolled by Vuillard's friend Marcel Proust, it
falls within a space that has been translated through the interiors of
Degas. The space is completely lucid, yet all calculation is subtly held
in check. Just when gatherings of color would seem to nearly turn
geometric clarification into pure pattern, Vuillard introduced in
perspective the precisely defined little mahogany (or red Chinese
lacquer) table and the long cardboard box, its ribbons suggesting a
florist's delivery, providing some small narrative outside our reading.
However, in contrast to earlier multifigure interiors such as The
Suitor of 1893 (Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Mass.),
which is given a cerebral quality by its mathematical calculation of a
complex arrangement of foreshortened planes, upright panels, and a
subtle interweaving of oblique angles, in The Album there is just

114

enough spatial elucidation to rest serenely in balance with the sensu-
ous interplay of two-dimensional pattern. When Vuillard takes up
the theme later in the decade, in the 1897 Large Interior with Six
Figures (Kunsthaus, Zurich), his pleasure in the tapestrylike surface
has receded into a more literal and descriptive mode, not only ex-
plaining the space of the room more specifically but also reintroduc-
ing the quality of nearly theatrical interplay between his characters,
which seems absent in The Album.

And yet, is The Album— or the series of five pictures— completely
without narrative implication? Much of Vuillard's great power to
seduce is in his ability to mysteriously suggest a glimpse, a moment,
that we only half understand. The seven women partake in shared
pleasures in a completely sisterly manner. The sense of their gentle
apartness in a rich bourgeois interior, very like the Natansons' rooms
where these pictures would hang, suggests a modern reference to the
seven vestal virgins, those wise Roman women representing domes-
tic virtues and the value of isolated perspective, who appear through-
out seventeenth-century French paintings.

Vuillard would, of course, be too elusive and too independent of
mind to force any historical (or for that matter, contemporary) refer-
ence. Yet his life in the 1890s was a balanced routine of picture
looking, visits to the theater, and attendance at soirees (particularly
at the Thadee Natansons, where he was famous for his nearly mute
good manners but always stayed to the end), which constituted, at
least in part, the creative ingredients for a picture as subtle and
implicative as this. Things he witnessed— either saw or sensed— were
filtered through his memory and imagination. For his close and
intimate friends Thadee and Misia, he produced a series of pictures
that are at once completely of their time in the fashion of the clothes
and the decor, yet quite out of time in a mood of domestic calm.

The complete ease with which he approached his subject is no
better evidenced than by the means with which he painted it, and, as
Thadee himself noted, the real subject is just this. The Album is
executed in a complex weave of light brushstrokes with very little
buildup of paint (except in the faces), no color overlapping another.
A buff ground seems to have been scraped away in silhouetted
patterns, most obviously in the large bouquet to the left, over which

the pigments are laid without underpainting or modulated tones,
almost as if applied with a stencil to accommodate each color variant.
At times these surfaces, which follow the described object only in a
general way, have the quality of inspired accident — the easing of a
figure into an overall network of patterns — that is so admired in
Japanese glazed ceramics. Sensuously rich lines appear — the long
wet stroke defining the top of the arch-backed sofa, for example —
like comets in a starry firmament, clear but almost immediately
subsumed by the pattern of the whole. No one element— line or
pattern, dark or light, recessive or aggressive color— outweighs any
other.

This ability to suggest mode and to imply narrative without break-
ing the discrete intimacy of his scene, along with his very understat-
ed control over his material, was beautifully expressed by the young
Andre Gide when he saw two decorative panels (not the Thadee set)
at the Salon dAutomne in 1905: "To return to M. Vuillard's decora-
tions, I don't know quite what is the most admirable thing about
them. Perhaps it is M. Vuillard himself. He is the most personal, the
most intimate of story-tellers. I know few pictures which bring the
observer so directly into conversation with the artist. I think it must
be because his brush never breaks free of the motion which guides it;
the outer world, for Vuillard, is always a pretext, an adjustable means
of expression. And above all it's because M. Vuillard speaks almost in
a whisper — as is only right when confidences are being exchanged —
and we have to bend over towards him to hear what he says.

"There is nothing sentimental or high-falutin' about the discreet
melancholy which pervades his work. Its dress is that of everyday. It is
tender, and caressing; and if it were not for the mastery that already
marks it, I should call it timid. For all his success, I can sense in
Vuillard the charm of anxiety and doubt. He never brings forward a
color without making it possible for it to fall back, subtly and delight-
fully, into the background. Too fastidious for plain statement, he
proceeds by insinuation He never strives for brilliant effect; har-
mony of tone is his continual preoccupation; science and intuition
play a double role in the disposition of his colors, and each one of
them casts new light on its neighbor, and as it were exacts a confes-
sion from it."15

JJR

115

Edouard Vuillard

FRENCH, 1868-1940

ROMAIN COOLUS AND HESSEL, 1900-1905
OIL ON CARDBOARD AFFIXED TO CANVAS, 14 '/a X
INCHES

RING THE 1890s Vuillard's greatest attachment, other than to
his mother, to whom he was profoundly devoted, was to the young
and capricious Misia Natanson, wife of one of Vuillard's most impor-
tant patrons, Thadee Natanson, for whom he did a series of decora-
tive panels including The Album (p. 112) in 1895. By the turn of the
century, the brilliant world that surrounded the Natansons and their
journal, La Revue Blanche, had shifted its artistic and intellectual
focus; the journal itself ceased publication in 1903, its demise has-
tened by Thadee's worsening finances. Perhaps an even harder blow
for Vuillard was Misia's divorce from Thadee to remarry into quite a
different world in 1905, this preceded by a troubled liaison with
Alfred Edwards, an immensely rich and onerous man who hastened
Thadee's financial collapse. As silent and withdrawn as Vuillard was
by all descriptions, these events must have meant a great sea change
in his life.

Salvation — and for a man so completely dependent on a regular
pattern of domestic intimacy it was just that— came through another
woman with whom he formed an attachment, perhaps even stronger
than that with Misia. She was Lucie Hessel, wife of the art dealer Jos
Hessel, who directed Bernheim-Jeune, one of the most successful
galleries in Paris. After the turn of the century Edouard and Lucie
met nearly every day. Portraits of her (fig. 173) and her friends, both
formal and as elements in his interior genre scenes, proliferated. Her
apartment on the rue de Rivoli and her houses at Versailles and in
Normandy became his second homes and the source of much of his
art. (Vuillard died at the beginning of the war, attempting to reach
her Norman house by train.)

Lucie Hessel could not have been more different from Misia Na-
tanson. She was tall, strong-jawed, and nearly Wagnerian in her
ardent manner, in contrast to the sensuous and subtle Misia. Her
world was grander and more conservative than that of the Revue
Blanche group: less daring, more aristocratic. The evolution of Vuil-
lard's style — particularly through the portrait commissions he re-
ceived from the higher levels of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy
— reflected, at least in part, this shift in his social milieu.

"Interested in life, greedy of confidences, devoted to her friends,
and enterprising as Vuillard was not, she receives the painter every
evening about six, does him the honours and keeps him to dinner.
Vuillard has a refining influence on Jos Hessel and indirectly, on the

customers who consult him Lucie by a thousand quasi-maternal

attentions, knew how to protect him, amuse him, deaden the shocks,
and initiate him into the underside of a society which, but for her, he
would not have had the time or the inclination to study. Into his
almost monastic life, she introduced the noise and dust of the
world."1

Here, Mine Hessel sits at a long table in her apartment on the rue
de Rivoli, reading or perhaps opening her morning mail. She is still
dressed in her peignoir. A large silver tray, holding a warming bell
(for her coffee?) and a porcelain cup, shares the tabletop with a
blooming Christmas cactus. A heavily shaded lamp projects from the
left. Beyond heron a red plush banquette, intent upon his writing on

a drop-leaf desk, is Lucie's (and Vuillard's) close friend, Romain
Coolus. Born Rene Weil in Rennes in 1868, he attended, like Vuil-
lard, the Lycee Condoret in Paris and launched himself early into a
career as a philosopher. His audacious and progressive attitudes (he
had his students read Stephane Mallarme) forced his resignation
from his teaching post in Chartres in 1891. He immediately became
one of the most loyal contributors to La Revue Blanche, where he
served as theater critic; the Revue published his first two books.2
During the 1890s he became one of the most lauded playwrights of
the boulevards; the success of his comedies carried into the 1920s.3
He was a bosom friend of Toulouse-Lautrec (fig. 174) and was some-
times bullied into staying with Lautrec during his extended residen-
cies in the florid brothels on the rue d'Ambroise or the rue des
Moulins. He had a great gift for friendship. Annette Vaillant (the
daughter of Alfred Natanson, Thadee's brother) remembered him
fondly: "short and sturdy, with a crooked face, a scholar with a hoarse
voice and a cracked laugh."4

These two figures — Coolus a continuation of Vuillard's earlier life,
Lucie Hessel his new Egeria (the name given her by Vuillard's friends
for the muselike powers she had over him) — share the picture-filled
room with the intimacy of long friendship, each intent on his or her
own task. Yet, despite its snug contentment, the interior is presented
without the complex working of patterns and subtle spatial invoca-
tions of those small, most intimate pictures of the 1890s (fig. 175).

The medium is laid on with fluidity and ease, a directness and a
seeming absence of calculation, that signal a new stage in the evolu-
tion of Vuillard's style. The colors have become more brilliant— the
fuchsia of the blooming plant setting the tonality that reappears in
the gradations of the lampshade, swift strokes gaily suggesting the
images of the pictures on the wall, the shadows between th° cushions
on the banquette balancing the light blue of Mme Hessel's robe. And
whereas Vuillard nearly always, even in the most completely devel-
oped pictures of the 1890s, painted with directness and with little
or no buildup, there is a new breadth here that suggests an easing
away from the intellectual formulations of the Nabis into a less ana-
lytical spontaneity.

Much is made of the exposed surface of the board that provides
the middle tones throughout. As opposed to the quick-drying dis-
temper paintings on this scale, which precede this picture, the oil
here is rich and deliciously viscous, allowing him to go back to the
paint— as he did, for example, in defining the lace panels on the
shoulders of Lucie's robe — with the end of his brush. Further, the
vague sense of mystery and the inexplicable, implied narratives of
the earlier interiors with pools of light have ceased here. We are no
longer entering the theater in the middle of an act. Whereas the
lamp is quickly suggested, it is not the light source even for Mme
Hessel's work; the room is flooded with an undramatic, bright morn-
ing evenness.

There is a new maturity here, in the world that Lucie Hessel made
possible for Vuillard. The subtler and intellectually swifter world of
Misia is behind him. A new spontaneity has emerged; intimacy seem-
ingly is now achieved without the burdens of probing into things that
run too deeply. This is not to say that any of his powers have subsid-
ed. The open armchair in the right foreground, for example,
presents as formidable a diff iculty in formal spatial delineation as
any problem he presented himself with earlier, but now he estab-
lished it more loosely, allow ing the form to dissolve onto the exposed
board. Vuillard seems more able to relax, and perhaps even to cele-
brate the virtues of friendship and domestic calm, in a more accept-
ing, less 111 gent manner.

.1.1 R

li6

Pablo Picasso

SPANISH, 1881-1973

At the Lapin Agile, 1905

oil on canvas, 39 x 39v2 inches

It's not such a bad thing, a picture which tells a story."1 This
casual observation made by Picasso to his dealer Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler may hold at least one of the keys to our understanding of
his work. Despite his tremendous stylistic variations and the some-
times nearly ruthless objectivity of his formal innovations, there is
always an engagement of self with the object, an implicit narrative
more often than not autobiographical. This is nowhere more appar-
ent than in the sober and haunting picture At the Lapin Agile.

On a nearly square canvas, three figures are placed along a sharp
diagonal. In the background, a splayed-kneed, squat man strums a
guitar. At the corner of the table, a woman in an orange dress,
wearing a gaudy bead choker, with a skimpy boa over her shoulders,
leans on her chin in stark profile, aggressively indifferent to her
companions. In the foreground, a lean man in a diaper-patterned
shirt clicks almost mechanically into three-quarters profile. The
white ground of the canvas, which serves as the flesh tones for the
woman, is broadly washed over with a single layer of wetly applied
paint, and only isolated details — the boa, the rosette and panache of
the woman's hat, the hands and the face of the young man in the
guise of Harlequin — are built up in high impasto. The figures are
swiftly drawn with long strokes of intense purple blue. The only
indications of rethinking within the remarkably direct execution are
the shadow passages under the man's arms, which are roughly laid on
after the placement of the figure to crimp his narrow torso. Of all
the major pictures done by Picasso in Paris in 1905, it is one of the
most immediately realized with the sparest execution.2

Sometimes known as The Harlequin Drinks, this painting first be-
longed to Frederic (Frede) Gerard, who hung it above the stage of his
bar, the Lapin Agile, in Montmartre (fig. 176).3 Frede, to whom the
artist had given the picture, was well known to Picasso and his
friends even before 1905.4 In 1905 he leased from Aristide Bruant,
whom Toulouse-Laufec had advertised in his famous poster, a build-
ing said to be a seventeenth-century shooting box in Montmartre,
which he ran into the late 1940s.5 He is fondly described by members
of Picasso's circle as bearded and rotund, playing his guitar and
singing bawdy songs to hold his customers for another round of
drinks. The drawing that Picasso made of him in preparation for the
painting (fig. 177) underscores how Picasso caricatured him in the
final work. His noseless face contrasts with the more fully modeled
features that Picasso gave himself as Harlequin, an identity immedi-
ately recognized when it was painted.6 However, it was not until ig62
thai Picasso identified the woman as Germaine Pichot, the wife of
Ramon Pichot, a Spanish sculptor and friend of Picasso's.7 She was
one of the people Picasso met in Paris on his first trip in 1900. Her
name was then Gargallo; she served as a model as well as a laundress.
Picasso briefly took up with one of her companions, but his close
friend from Barcelona, Carlos Casagemas, became totally infatuated
with Germaine (fig. 178). Picasso returned to Barcelona with his
friend later that year, in part, to distract him from this unhappy love
affair (Casagemas was impotent), but Casagemas's agitation only in-
creased there and he returned to Paris alone. On February 7, 1901,
Casagemas gathered Spanish friends with Germaine at the Hippo-
drome restaurant, seemingly for a farewell dinner before returning

to Spain. In the course of the meal he pulled out a pistol, fired at
Germaine and then turned the gun on himself. Germaine only ap-
peared to be wounded, but Casagemas died several hours later.8
When the news reached Picasso in Barcelona, he and the group of
progressive artists who gathered at the cafe Quatre Gats were pro-
foundly shocked; Casagemas's mother fell dead at the news. Picasso
immediately painted two imaginary deathbed portraits of his friend,
followed by a group of allegorical pictures that climaxed in the
Burial of Casagemas.9 In his most ambitious and evocative work of the
Blue Period, La Vie of 1903-4, he replaced his own features with
those of Casagemas for the male lover.10

On his final move to Paris in 1904, Picasso saw a fair amount of
Germaine, who had married Ramon Pichot soon after Casagemas's
suicide and even spent a holiday in Cadaques with the Pichots, Fer-
nande Olivier, and Andre Derain, who had taken up with another
friend of Germaine's. Gertrude Stein, who had first met Picasso at
that time, describes her in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: "She
was quiet and serious and Spanish, she had the square shoulders and
the unseeing fixed eyes of a Spanish woman." She then goes on, less
admiringly: "There were many other tales of Germaine Pichot and
the circus where she found her lovers."11

The potency of Germaine's image carried well beyond the Blue
Period, progressively more as the symbol of the femme fatale. Ron-
ald Alley argued persuasively that she is the manic bacchante, savage
and seductive, who appears on the right of the Tate Gallery Three
Dancers of 1925.12 She seems not to reappear in his work thereafter,
but Francoise Gilot recounted a visit to her after World War II: "I saw
a little old lady, toothless and sick, lying in bed. I stood by the door
while Pablo talked quietly with her. After a few minutes he laid some
money on her night table. She thanked him profusely and we went
out again. Pablo didn't say anything as we walked down the street. I
asked him why he had brought me to see the woman. 'I want you to
learn about life,' he said quietly. But why especially that woman? I
asked him. 'That woman's name is Germaine Pichot. She's old and
toothless and poor and unfortunate now,' he said. But when she was
young she was very pretty and she made a painter friend of mine

suffer so much that he committed suicide She turned a lot of

heads. Now look at her.'"13

The delicately vulnerable Harlequin with the artist's features; the
almost Gorgonlike presence of Germaine with her inflamed lips and
taut pose: it is the fundamental union of love and death that suffuses
so much of Picasso's work. Yet the identification of Germaine and
her relationship to Picasso and Casagemas scarcely reveals the pic-
ture entirely; clearly it is more than just a declaration of alienation,
man from woman. The foolish comic Frede in the background disal-
lows too categorical a reading as does the mixture of chic and men-
ace in Germaine's clothes and makeup. It is a picture still somewhat
in the shadow of Toulouse-Lautrec, who struck Picasso so forcefully
on his first visit to Paris, both in its freely washed on swiftness of
execution and the carefully staged degrees of characterization.14 For
all the forces of alienation so often seen in the picture it is not
surprising that one early viewer, the writer Eugene Marsan, who saw
the picture at the Lapin Agile, noted in his novel Sandricourt (1906):
"They aren't even looking at one another, yet we know they are
lovers."15 By interjecting himself as the noble, quietly suffering Harle-
quin, he has brought matters to a moment of brittle crystallization.
The Nietzschean masks are still on here; not until the self-portrait of
1906 does Picasso leave behind the tautly wrought narrative and
role-playing of his youth.16 It is Picasso's remarkable gift to present
himself, here as Harlequin, at once as both participant and witness,
fact and symbol.17

Il8

Henri Matisse

FRENCH, 1869-1954

Odalisque with Gray Trousers, 1927
oil on canvas, 25v8 x 32 inches

In the late teens and early 1920s, Matisse painted many works in
which a female figure is shown seated in front of an open window.
Then, gradually, he began to close in the environment of his apart-
ment at 1 place Charles-Felix in Nice, doing away with the windows
and placing Moorish-style screens,1 oriental fabrics, and flowered
papers in the background to create a stage set for the figure. As he
came to emphasize these decorative patterns, he gave the figure the
guise of an odalisque. Although he had portrayed odalisques before,
following winter trips to Morocco in 1911-12 and 1912-13, the lush
Mediterranean environment of Nice, where he had taken up resi-
dence, inspired renewed fascination with the theme. Matisse's odalis-
ques are at once exotic and erotic, in the tradition of the hothouses
created by Delacroix and Ingres. When asked about his interest,
however, Matisse sidestepped these associations: "I paint odalisques
in order to paint the nude. But how is the nude to be painted without
being artificial? And also because I know it exists. I was in Morocco. I
saw it."2 Certainly the odalisque in Odalisque with Gray Trousers, with
her athletic body and disproportionately small head, is less sensual
than others Matisse painted during the 1920s. The image of a volup-
tuous harem girl has been diminished, in part due to the influence of
Michelangelo's sculpture, for about this time in his career Matisse was

adapting a number of poses from figures in the Medici Chapel.3

Matisse's compositions of the 1920s, culminating in such works as
the one here, render all elements equal in weight. That is, even while
the sculptural figure is in dramatic contrast to the flat planarity of
the various fabrics, Matisse's ambition is to make a vibrant unity of
diverse, equally emphasized parts. This dynamic organization is
reinforced by the sharp, sometimes discordant, color contrasts.
Rhythm is the crucial vehicle by which the painting is constructed,
staccatd when jumping from pattern to pattern or color to color,
languorous when following the full curves of the samovar, echoed by
the figure's exaggerated body.

Odalisque with Gray Trousers varies from other works of 1927 by the
absence of the oft-repeated table and by the distinctly more con-
trived depiction of the figure,4 but the inclusion of the samovar
marks it as a work of that year. From 1920 to early 1927, Matisse's
principal model was Henriette Darricarrere. Although the artist
generalizes his figures to such an extent that positive identification is
made difficult, comparison with a contemporaneous photograph
(fig. 179) suggests that the pursed-lipped figure with hair gathered
at the sides of her head is, indeed, Henriette. Therefore, the paint-
ing can with a fair degree of certainty be dated to early 1927.5

It has been proposed that Odalisque with Gray Trousers is related to
a drawing entitled Seated Odalisque, Ornamental Ground, Flowers, and
Fruit (fig. 180).6 While there are numerous variations between the
two images, if an amusing lithograph of 1929 entitled Odalisque,
Brazier, and Cup of Fruit (fig. 181) is compared with both, the rela-
tionship becomes more assured. The lithograph combines features
of the painting and the drawing, suggesting that the first two works
were part of the same thought process.

L20

Pierre Bonnard

FRENCH, 1867-1947

Meadow in Bloom, c. 1935

oil on canvas, 35v2 x 355/3 inches

M eadow in bloom offers a luxuriant landscape,1 probably of
Bonnards garden at his home Le Bosquet in Le Cannet. Here, in
contrast to the exhilarating jumble of The Garden, c. 1936, 2 Bonnard
created a more carefully tended, not nearly so agitated, image of
nature, including pruned plantings and what appears to be a plowed
field. The vegetation is cultivated and is enjoyed by someone.
"There is hardly any Bonnard landscape as deserted as it first
seems," wrote Jean Clair, "only showing itself to be inhabited after a
lengthy look. A landscape existed for him, not in itself, but in the
function of a human presence, no matter where he might tuck it."3 In
this case the human presence is the woman in white in the upper left
center of the composition.

Although Bonnard usually distorted his subject matter for pictori-
al purposes, Meadow in Bloom is, nevertheless, distinctive in his land-
scape oeuvre. Instead of creating a semblance of spatial recession,
Bonnard tipped the field upward in a fashion that can be described
as at once stylistically primitive and advanced. Bonnard analyzed the
methods of naive artists in 1936: "Sunday painters: their naive love
of objects leads them to discoveries. Techniques correspond to nec-
essary artifice, the requirements of nature causing a limitation."4 As
if momentarily copying the practice of the dabbler, in order to

carefully inventory and record all of the plant types observed in the
garden as well as the activities of both the hobbyist and the farmer,
Bonnard eliminated shadows, employed a miniaturistic approach,
and artificially flattened the space into a register of horizontal
planes. The flattening of space is, of course, a technique also em-
ployed by sophisticated painters. Bonnard wrote in 1935: "Planes
through color. Rough out with color contrasts."5 Hence, we move
from brown to lavender in the lower section, then to the large field
of green, a row of purple flowers and dark-green, spiky plants in the
middle ground, then to a pattern of alternating orange and dark
purple bands above. Bonnard knowingly distinguished himself from
his contemporaries, who finally sought to dispense with subject mat-
ter. He wrote in 1934, "When one distorts nature, it still remains
underneath, unlike purely imaginative works."6 For Bonnard, sub-
ject and structure meld with neither being compromised; he is not
interested in making "purely imaginary works," that is, complete
abstractions.

If Meadow in Bloom appears exceptional in comparison with Bon-
nard's late landscapes, it is altogether reminiscent of his contempora-
neous still lifes and interiors. In its exaggerated perspective, with the
green plain a kind of terrace poised precipitously above the plowed
field, the composition resembles many in which a tilted tabletop or
floor is seen— for example, The Table of 1925 (fig. 182); also repeated
are the horizontal bands at the lower edge. Too, the juxtaposition of
the curious brickwork in the upper left with the field recalls the
patterns of tilework side by side with shutters in so many back-
grounds of his figurative paintings.7 It would appear, then, that
Meadow in Bloom is a unique attempt by Bonnard to apply the compo-
sitional arrangement of his domestic environments to a landscape.

122

Georges Braque

FRENCH, 1882-1963

Boats on the Beach at L'Estaque, 1906
oil on canvas, 15 x l8'/8 inches

Xauvism, pioneered in the early years of the new century by,
among others, Matisse, Andre Derain (1880-1954), anc^ Maurice
Vlaminck (1876-1958), built on Impressionist and neo-Impression-
ist pictorial innovations. While retaining a love of light, color, and
domesticated landscape, the Fauves employed the pictorial elements
in an increasingly arbitrary fashion, more for abstract purposes than
for descriptive or representational functions. As a result, color and
brushwork became dazzlingly independent, while a specific sense of
locale was sacrificed in favor of generalized depictions. Braque was
entranced by the Fauve style when he visited the 1905 Salon
d'Automne in Paris,1 later proclaiming that "Matisse and Derain
opened the road for me."2 He became the youngest member of the
group, and first came to prominence in 1906 as a Fauve painter.
Braque exhibited at the March 1906 Salon des Independants, the
only event at which the entire Fauve group was seen together in that
period; however, he was unhappy with his first canvases in the new
style and subsequently destroyed them. A change of scene was
needed.

With Othon Friesz (1879-1949), another Fauve painter and an old
friend from Le Havre, Braque went to Antwerp, where he stayed
from August 14 to September 11, 1906, and began to lighten his
palette. After returning to Paris for the rest of September and part
of October, he traveled, once more with Friesz, to the southern port
of L'Estaque, where he remained until February 1907. The small
village with a rounded harbor and low rents,3 west of Marseille and
1 1 1 j against t he foothills of the Alps, had been a font of inspiration for
Derain and, preceding him, Cezanne.4 There Braque's color bright-
ened dramatically and became almost completely arbitrary in its
application, and he produced his first truly Fauve works, including
Boats on the Beach at L'Estaque. It was an intoxicating breakthrough,
as fie later described: "For me Fauvism was a momentary adventure

in which I became involved because I was young.... I was freed from
the studios, only twenty-four, and full of enthusiasm. I moved toward
what for me represented novelty and joy, toward Fauvism. It was in
the south of France that I first felt truly elated. Just think, I had only
recently left the dark, dismal Paris studios where they still painted
with pitch!"5

Boats on the Beach at LEstaque ought to be considered a companion
to LEstaque (fig. 183) and LEstaque, Wharf (fig. 184), the latter dated
by Braque to November 1906.6 In these harbor scenes of similar
color harmonies, Braque utilized a conventional composition of hor-
izontal registers such as is seen in The Port of Antwerp of 1906 (fig.
185); anchoring the foreground space in each is a solidly described
form, either a rock, a wharf, or boats.7 Also evident are the violets
and crimsons that appear in the Antwerp canvas. Braque does ex-
pand on his earlier formulas with Fauve-style brushstrokes to define
the water, with the use of white, and with the generally more exuber-
ant and arbitrary color harmony. Whereas the other Fauves tended
toward primary colors, Braque departed from these, favoring pink,
ocher, orange, and purple tonalities; he added, too, to the Fauve
vocabulary with his characteristically long, serpentine lines that de-
fine the boats. It was as though Braque's first task in the southern sun
were to further liberate his color, and so he maintained his usual
approach to subject matter and composition. Boats on the Beach at
LEstaque can be counted among his first fully realized Fauve can-
vases. Only upon forsaking his observations of the sea in favor of the
landscape (see fig. 186) did he advance within the Fauve agenda,
gradually eliminating the foreground while compressing space, and
formulating more agitated compositions. The serpentine line be-
came an increasingly dominant motif in these synthetic and more
generalized treatments of nature; whether defining a road, a hill-
side, or a tree, it helps flatten the space by its abstract quality.

At the March 1907 Salon des Independants, Braque finally met
Matisse, Vlaminck, and Derain. The occasion was auspicious not
only because of this meeting but also because Braque showed and
sold six L'Estaque paintings, and that year signed a contract with
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso's dealer. The following summer,
1908, coincidentally at L'Estaque once again, Braque produced his
first Cubist canvases, in which the lessons of Fauvism contributed
toward compositions with trees on the most forward-leaning planes
and with the familiar path through a landscape.

124

Georges Braque

FRENCH, 1882-1963

The Studio, 1939

oil on canvas, 44'/2 x 57v2 inches

Xhe 1939 Studio is a prologue to the series of large paintings
Georges Braque made over a period of seventeen years, exploring
the spaces in which he worked virtually all his life.1 The paintings in
this series are considered by many the masterpieces of his late style.
Each has its own mood and special poetic complexity, yet if the
Annenberg painting is placed in comparison to the last of the group,
Studio VIII of 1952-55,2 one has the sense of a great circular voyage
completed.

Within Braque's evolution there are no abrupt moments, as with
Picasso, nor rich and fallow times as with Matisse. The Studio grace-
fully- expands upon ideas and sensations already in play in the 1938
Still Life with a Skull* and the more complex Studio with Black Vase* of
the same year. The 1938 pictures are glorious reinvestigations of
matter and space, which Braque began to explore during the heroic
first years of Cubism in 1911-12. In 1939 his concerns subtly shift
from objects within a space, the tradition of Cezanne and Chardin
still lifes, to the space of the studio itself. The objects within that
space are now but the means for a new plan of investigation. The
series continued to develop in a darker and more complex mode
until the final work, which brightens nearly to the 1938 level.

The Studio is, in one way, a completely lucid picture. The site is
Braque's studio, which he built in 1931, on the Norman coast at
Varengeville, near Dieppe. The window faces south, since he pre-
ferred a variable to an invariable light.5 Its contents are presented
from essentially one point of view, looking down at a rather sharp
angle. Two separate tables on the far left, one multilegged, the other
with a single pedestal (the gue'ridon found in so many of his earlier
images) are placed one in front of the other. The one in back holds a
black vase (which also appears in the 1938 black-vase painting) con-
taining green leaves, which sits on a fringed doily that has been
tossed onto a rectangular tray. The table in front holds the artist's
palette, the brushes daubed with alternating red and green paint. At
right is a rustic, caned stool, its seat tipped nearly to the picture
plane, revealing a chevron pattern that prefigures Jasper Johns's

cross-hatch paintings of the 1970s and 1980s. On the easel beyond is
a small canvas, from which extends a pink, four-pointed star; this is
Braque's rudimentary introduction of the soaring bird that would be
found in so many of his later studio pictures. By the 1950s it would
become nearly as immediate a symbol for Frenchness as the Gallic
cock. Floral wallpaper from an indeterminate wall plays in brown
and blue panels up the left side; multicolored floorboards form a
vertical picket in the central area. The window, revealing two electric
lines that cross just at the left mullion, opens to a cloud-dappled sky.
It is only with the vertical panel of blue on the far right, showing the
outline of a balustrade, that such a rational exposition of the picture
starts to unravel. The blue, while quite different from that of the sky,
seems to punch a hole completely through the wall (the panel of
red-orange above) or floor ("behind" the stool); or is it to be under-
stood as a painting of a balustrade silhouetted against the sky
propped against the wall? The underlying equivocation of the ob-
jects, their complete participation in the textures and design of their
surroundings (the palette, for example, goes through three material
transformations), quickly transforms the picture into quite a differ-
ent realm of experience, one full of droll ambiguity and decorative
seduction, which is quite beyond analysis but retains the almost
Aristotelian assurance that the space remains unsullied. As Braque
once commented in his notebook: "The only thing that matters in
art is what cannot be explained."6

The industry of the execution is immense: paints are sometimes
thickened with sand to give them the density of a plaster wall, others
are washed on with great transparency. Forms stay in a single plane
while at the same time creating (constructing is too dour a word for
acts of such gallant ease) the space through their interweaving, mak-
ing fine play with the abandoned means of conventional linear per-
spective. As Jean Cassou noted in 1949, there is always something of
both the laborer and the aristocrat about Braque, steady in his task
with such gentle discretion.7

Artists' descriptions of the spaces in which they work date back at
least to Velazquez's Las Meninas. Courbet took on the task most
pretentiously, Seurat most soberly. Of Braque's own generation, Pi-
casso and Matisse both gave some of their greatest efforts to the
subject. Yet it was Braque who made it a central concern and, during
much of his later life, turned repeatedly to the space contained
within his studio and made it the subject of his most complex works.
Those following the war often descend into moody introspection;
this work of 1939 maintains a levity and quickness of mind while

launching the graver works to follow.

6 6 JJR

126

DOCUMENTATION

Camille Corot

French, 1796-1875

The Curious Little Girl, 1850-60

Signed lower right: Corot

Oil on board, i6'4 x n'4" (41.4 x 28.5 cm)

provenance: Gift of the artist to George
Camus, Arras, February 24, 1864; Boussod
and Valadon, Paris; Sir William Van Home,
Montreal, by 1893; Mrs. William Van Home,
as of 1962.

exhibitions: Art Association of Montreal,
1893, no. 13, 1908, no. g, 1912, no. 25; Art
Association of Montreal, 'A Selection from
the Collection of Paintings of the Late Sir
William Van Home, K.C.M.G, 1843-1915,"
October 16-November 5, 1933, no. 127; The
Tate Gallery, London, "The Annenberg
Collection," September 2-October 8, 1969,
no. 10.

literature: Alfred Robaut and Etienne
Moreau-Nelaton, L'Oeuvre de Corot (Paris,
1905), vol. 2, no. 1042 (repro.); John La
Farge, The Higher Life in Art (New York,
1908), n.p. (repro.); E. Waldmann, 'Art in
America— Modern French Pictures: Some
American Collections," The Burlington Maga-
zine, vol. 17 (April-September 1910), p. 65;
August F. Jaccaci, "Figure Pieces of Corot in
America: I," Art in America, vol. 1 (1913), pp.
82, 86 (repro.), 87; "Pictures in Sir William
Van Home's Collection," The New York Times
Magazine, September 19, 1915, p. 21; C.
Bernheim de Villers, Corot: Peintre de figures
(Paris, 1930), no. 139 (repro.), p. 56; Seymour
de Ricci, "L'Incendie dans la collection de Sir
William Home," Beaux-Arts, May 14, 1933,
p. 4; Charles Wasserman, "Canada's Finest
Art Collection," Mayfair, vol. 26 (October
1952), repro. p. 53; R. H. Hubbard, European
Paintings in Canadian Collections: II. Modern
Schools (Toronto, 1962), p. 151.

NOTES

1. This remark was made to Camille Pissarro
and overheard by Corot's biographer Alfred
Robaut; quoted by Jean Dieterle in Wilden-
stein, New York, "Corot," October 30-
December 6, 1969.

2. Alfred Robaut and Etienne Moreau-
Nelaton, L'Oeuvre de Corot (Paris, 1905), vol.

2. nos. 309 and 550.

3. Tableaux a la Plume (Paris), 1880, p. 312;
quoted in Charles Sterling and Margaretta
M. Salinger, French Paintings: A Catalogue of
the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, vol. 2, XIX Century (Greenwich, Conn.,
1966), p. 65.

4. As listed in Robaut and Moreau-Nelaton,
1905, index, p. 52.

5. Quoted in Denys Sutton, Edgar Degas: Life
and Work (New York, 1986), p. 96.

6. L. Roger-Miles, Corot (Paris, 1891),
pp. 84-85.

7. John La Farge, The Higher Life in Art
(New York, 1908), p. 162.

8. For the critical response to the 1909 exhi-
bition, see, especially, Raymond Bouyer,
"Corot: Peintre de figures," Revue de I'art
ancien et moderne, vol. 26 (July-December
1909), pp. 295-306.

g. This label on the reverse of the painting
was recorded by Robaut and Moreau-
Nelaton, 1905, vol. 2, no. 1042: "Donne a
mon ami M. Camus, fils. C. Corot, ce 24
fevrier 1864." The mahogany backing to
which the board is now mounted prevents
confirmation that the label is still attached.
10. Ibid.

u. Ibid., vol. 3, nos. 975 and 1341. Camus pur-
chased The Dreamer at the Fountain with the
intercession of Dutilleux for 600 francs.
On June 29, 1861, Corot wrote from Ville
d'lvray to Dutilleux in Arras to assure Mme
Camus that he had "not forgotten the little
landscape and that it will be sent any min-
ute." Ibid., vol. 4, p. 339, letter no. 123.

12. Charles Baudelaire, Art in Paris,
1845-1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions
Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, translated and
edited by Jonathan Mayne (Greenwich,
Conn., 1965), p. 24.

13. It is tempting to identify The Curious Little
Girl on the basis of physical resemblance with
the eldest daughter of Mme Edouard
Delalain (later Mme de Graet), who was the
owner of a textile shop on the rue Saint Hon-
ore for whom Corot worked briefly before
his career as a painter, and who received
him as a friend for more than twenty years.
In 1825 Corot had already drawn a portrait
of Mme Delalain. Between 1845 and 1850 he
made individual portraits of the entire family,
including that of the eldest daughter at about
age eight (sale, Hotel Drouet, November 20,
1987, lot 9). A letter written to Dutilleux on
September 23, 1853, from the village of
Bourberouge in Normandy, mentions Corot's
stay with the Delalain family during which
time Mile Delalain may well have served as
his model (Robaut and Moreau-Nelaton,
1905, vol. 1, p. 152). This would narrow the
suggested period of execution of the painting
to a more precise date. Such identification
remains, however, speculative until more
firmly documented.

14. For the theme of melancholy in Corot's
painting, see Antje Zimmermann, "Studien
zum Figurenbild bei Corot," Ph.D. diss.,
University of Cologne, 1986.

15. Baudelaire, 1965, p. 197

130

FIG. i Camille Corot (French,
1796-1875), A Woman Reading, 1869,
oil on canvas, 21V8 x 143/8" (54.3 x
37.5 cm), The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, Gift of
Louise Senff Cameron in memory
of Charles H. Senff

FIG. 3 Camille Corot, Woman with
a Pearl, c. 1868-70, oil on canvas,
27'/* x 211/*" (70 x 55 cm), Musee du
Louvre, Paris

FIG. 2 Bernard Lepicie (French,
1698-1755) after Jean Simeon
Chardin (French, 1699-1779),
Little Girl Playing Badminton,
engraving, i2s/8 x 9>4" (31.5 x 23.5
cm), Philadephia Museum of Art

fig. 4 Octave Tassaert (French,
1800-1874), Poor Child, 1855, oil on
canvas, 13 x 934" (33 x 24.8 cm),
John G.Johnson Collection at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Eugene Boudin

French, 1824-1898
On the Beach, Dieppe, 1864
Signed and dated lower right: E. Boudin
1864

Oil on panel, 12V4 x (31.7 x 29.2 cm)

provenance: James McCormick; sale,
American Art Association, New York, March
28-30, 1904, lot 158; Daniel G. Reid, New
York; W O. Cole, Chicago; Knoedler and Co.,
New York.

EXHIBITIONS: Philadelphia Museum of Art,
"Exhibition of Philadelphia Private Collec-
tors," summer 1963 (no catalogue); The Tate
Gallery, London, "The Annenberg Collec-
tion," September 2-October 8, 1969, no. 3.

LITERATURE: Robert Schmit, Eugene Boudin,
1824— 1898 (Paris, 1973; suppl., Paris, 1984),
vol. 1, no. 301 (repro.); Jean Selz, E. Boudin
(Paris, 1982), p. 61 (repro. cover).

FIG. 5 James Abbott McNeill
Whistler (American, 1834-1903),
Blue and Silver, Trouville, 1865, oil on
canvas, 233/8 x 285/ii" (59.3 x 72.8
cm), Freer Gallery of Art, Smith-
sonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

131

NOTES

1. Boudin to Martin, June 14, 1869; quoted
in G. Jean-Aubry and Robert Schmit, Eugene
Boudin, translated by Caroline Tisdall
(Greenwich, Conn., 1968), p. 74.

2. Charles Baudelaire, "The Salon of 1859,"
in Art in Paris, 1845-1862: Salons and Other
Exhibitions, translated and edited by Jonathan
Mayne (Greenwich, Conn., 1965), pp. 199-200.

3. Quoted in John Rewald, The History of
Impressionism, rev. and enl. ed. (New York,
1961), pp. 37-38.

4. Ibid., p. 38.

Eugene Boudin

French, 1824-1898

On the Beach, Sunset, 1865

Signed and dated lower right:

E. Boudin— 65
Oil on panel, i4ls/i6 x 23V16" (38 x 58.5 cm)

PROVENANCE: Cadart and Luquet, Paris;
Wildenstein and Co., New York.

exhibitions: Galerie Schmit, Paris, "Eugene
Boudin, 1824-1898," May 5-26, 1965, no. 13;
The Tate Gallery, London, "The Annenberg
Collection," September 2-October 8, 1969,
no. 4.

literature: G. Jean-Aubry and Robert
Schmit, Eugene Boudin (Paris, 1968), no. 59
(repro.); G. Jean-Aubry and Robert Schmit,
Eugene Boudin, translated by Caroline Tisdall
(Greenwich, Conn., 1968), no. 59 (repro.);
Robert Schmit, Eugene Boudin, 1824—1898
(Paris, 1973; suppl., Paris, 1984), vol. 1, no.
342 (repro.); Jean Selz, E. Boudin (Paris,
1982), p. 38 (repro.), p. 61.

3. Boudin to Martin, February 12, 1863;
quoted in G Jean-Aubry and Robert Schmit,
Eugene Boudin, translated by Caroline Tisdall
(Greenwich, Conn., 1968), p. 50.

4. Boudin to Martin, August 28, 1867;
quoted in ibid., p. 65.

5. Boudin to Martin, September 3, 1868;
quoted in ibid., p. 72.

FIG. 6 Eugene Boudin (French,
1824-1898), Beach Scene at Deau-
ville, 1865, oil on canvas, i6\4 x
25'/«" (42 x 65 cm), Collection of Mr.
and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Upperville, Va.

NOTES

1. As noted somewhat later by Baedeker,
Trouville-sur-Mer (adjoined by the slightly
less lashionable Deauville, |usi a< ross the
Touques River) "is (me of the most fre-
quented watering-places on the coast of Nor-
mandy. The season lasts from July to October
and is at its height in August, when living
here is extremely expensive." Karl Baedeker,
Northern France, 5th ed. (Leipzig, 1909), p. 153.

2. Robert Schmit, Eugene Boudin, 1824-1898
(Paris, 1973; suppl., Paris, 1984), vol. 1, p. XL.
See also Joanna Richardson, La Vie Pari-
sienne, 1852-1870 (New York, 1971), p. 189.
Isabev, who is more securely connected with
the art and society of the preceding reign of
kin^ Louis-Philippe ( 1830- t8), painted

.mi ( dotal \ iews oi I igures on the beaches at
these Mies.

132

Eugene Boudin

French, 1824-1898

Princess Metternich on the Beach,

c. 1865-67
Oil on paperboard, mounted on

panel, 119/16 x g'4" (29.4 x 23.5 cm)

PROVENANCE: Purchased from the artist by
M. Duval, Paris, 1867; Kuenegel, Le Havre;
Wildenstein and Co., New York; Mrs. Ira
Haupt, New York.

literature: G. Jean-Aubry and Robert
Schmit, Eugene Boudin (Paris, 1968), no. 83
(repro.); G. Jean-Aubry and Robert Schmit,
Eugene Boudin, translated by Caroline Tisdall
(Greenwich, Conn., 1968), no. 83 (repro.);
Robert Schmit, Eugene Boudin, 1824-1898
(Paris, 1973; suppl., Paris, 1984), vol. 1,
no. 356 (repro.).

NOTES

1. Robert Schmit has recently discovered that
it was bought from Boudin by M. Duval, a
gilder, in 1867. See Eugene Boudin, 1824-1898
(Paris, 1973; suppl., Paris, 1984), suppl.,

p. 136.

2. "Elle, toujours elle! Dans la rue, au Casino,
a Trouville, a Deauville, a pied, en voiture,
sur la plage, au bal des enfants, au bal des
grandes personnes, toujours et partout, ce
monstre qui n'est rien et qui n'a rien, ni grace
ni esprit ni bienfaisahce, qui n'a que l'ele-
gance que lui vend, cent mille francs par an,
son costumier. ..." Edmond and Jules de
Goncourt.yowrna/: Memoir es de la vie litter -
aire, edited by Robert Ricatte (Paris, 1956),
vol. 2 (1864-1878), p. 72 (author's trans.).

3. 'Avec un nez en trompette, des levies en
rebord de pot de chambre, tres pale, Pair

d'un vrai masque de Venise " Ibid., vol. 1

(1851-1863), P- 1268.

.4. Quoted in John Rewald, Un Portrait de la
Princesse Metternich par Edgar Degas,"
L'Amour de I'Art, vol. 3 (March 1937), p. 89.

FIG. 7 Constantin Guys (French,
1802-1892), A Fashionable Woman,
watercolor on paper, 13V4 x q*/4"
(34.2 x 23.4 cm), Phillips Collec-
tion, Washington, DC.

FIG. 8 Photograph of Princess
Metternich

FIG. g Edgar Degas (French,
1834-1917), Princess Pauline
Metternich, c. 1861, oil on canvas,
lb'/s x ii3/8" (41 x 29 cm), National
Gallery, London

Edouard Manet

French, 1832-1883

Mme Manet at Bellevue, 1880

Oil on canvas, 3134 x 2334" (80.8 x 60.5 cm)

provenance: Suzanne Manet; Max Lie-
bermann, Berlin, by 1902; deposited in
Kunsthaus, Zurich, 1933, no. 8; Mr. and Mrs.
Kurt Riezler, New York; Mr. and Mrs. Vladi-
mir Horowitz, New York, by 1947.

exhibitions: Stedelijk Museum, Amster-
dam, "Honderdjaar Fransche Kunst," July 2-
September 25, 1938, no. 158; Paul Rosenberg
and Co., New York, "Masterpieces by Manet,"
December 26, ig46-January 11, 1947, no. 9.

literature: Theodore Duret, Histoire
d'Edouard Manet et de son oeuvre ( Paris, 1902),
no. 275; Paul Jamot, Georges Wildenstein,
and Marie-Louise Bataille, Manet (Paris,
1921), vol. 1, no. 397, fig. 57; Etienne Moreau-
Nelaton, Manet catalogue MS., Bibliotheque
Nationale, Department des Estampes, Paris,
1926, no. 288; Adolphe Tabarant, Manet '
(Paris, 1931), no. 322; Gotthard Jedlicka,
Edouard Manet (Erlenbach and Zurich, 1941),
repro. opp. p. 301; Adolphe Tabarant, Manet
et ses oeuvres, 8th ed. (Paris, 1947), p. 385;
Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass., Draw-
ings from the Collection of Curtis 0. Baer, Jan-
uary 11-February 25, 1958, p. 60; Sandra
Orienti, Tout I'oeuvre peint d'Edouard Manet
( Paris, 1970), no. 313, (repro.); Germain
Bazin, Edouard Manet (Milan, 1972), repro. p.
Hi; Karl-Heinz Janda and Annegret Janda,
"Max I.iebermann als Kunstsammler," in
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Eorschungen und
Berichle, vol. 15 (1973), pp. 106, 135, no. 64;
Denis Rouarl and Daniel Wildenstein,
Edouard Manet: Catalogue raisonnS (Lausanne
and Paris, 1975), vol. 1, no. 345; Charles F.
St in key and Naomi E. Maurer, Toulouse-
Lautrec: Paintings (Chicago, 1979), p. 150,
fig. 2; Leal Senado de Macau and Museu
Luis de Camoes, Macau, Femme Assise ( Pay-
sage) de Edouard Manet, April 3-10, 1987, p. 38.

NOTES

1. "II existe a Bellevue un etablissement
hydrotherapique, bati dans une partie du
pare de l'ancien chateau. Les eaux, amenees
des sources du Montalais, sont limpides, sans
odeur. d'une saveur agreable et d'une assimi-
lati on facile." La Grande Encyclope'die, inven-
taire raisonne des sciences, des lettres et des arts,
s.v. "Bellevue."

2. Etienne Moreau-Nelaton, Manet raconte par
lui-meme (Paris, 1926), vol. 2, p. 72. The Por-
trait of Emilie Ambre as Carmen is in the Phila-
delphia Museum of Art.

3. "Decidement, la campagne n'a de charmes
que pour ceux qui ne sont pas forces d'y res-
ter," Manet wrote to his friend Zacharie
Astruc at the beginning of his Bellevue
sojourn; quoted in ibid., p. 68. See Adolphe
Tabarant, Manet et ses oeuvres, 8th ed. (Paris,
1947), pp. 385, 394; and Antonin Proust,
Edouard Manet: Souvenirs (Paris, 1913),

PR !29-30-

4. The letter, which is undated, is reprinted
in Moreau-Nelaton, 1926, vol. 2, p. 73.

5. Manet to Emile Zola, October 15, 1880,
published in Francoise Cachin, Charles S.
Moffett, and Michel Melot, Manet, 1832-1883
(New York, 1983), p. 528.

6. Ibid., pp. 423-25.

7. Denis Rouart and Daniel Wildenstein,
Edouard Manet: Catalogue raisonne
(Lausanne, 1975), vol. 2, no. 599 (repro.).

8. This was formerly in the collection of
Curtis O. Baer; ibid., no. 409 (repro.).

9. Ibid., no. 425 (repro.).

10. 'Album de Photographic" vol. 2, no. 41,
The Piecpont Morgan Library, New York,
Tabarant Collection.

11. Rouart and Wildenstein, 1975, vol. 2,

no. 346; Theodore Duret, Histoire d'Edouard
Manet et de son oeuvre ( Paris, 1902), no. 188
(repro.).

12. The date of sale of this last portrait
remains speculative. From an entry in Mme
Manet's account book, it is possible that the
painting left her personal collection in 1897,
fourteen years after the artist's death: "Vendu
fevrier 1897 six mille cinq cents francs/le
vieux musicien a Camentran [«c]/pour
Durand-Ruel/le vieux musicien avec la
femme au chapeau de Bellevue"; then two
years later, "1 fevrier 1899/Recu 7 mille
francs pour le vieux musicien et l'esquisse
Bellevue," "Carnet de comptes de Madame
Manet," fols. 11, 31, The Pierpont Morgan
Library, New York, Tabarant Collection.
Tabarant, 1947, p. 384; and Rouart and
Wildenstein, 1975, vol. 2, p. 344, have
assumed the Bellevue sketch to be the Young
Woman in the Garden (location unknown), but
the extremely unfinished nature of that work
raises the question whether Mme Manet
would have been able to sell it at that time.
The entries in her account book are too cur-
sory to support either identification categori-
cally, but it is worth pointing out that she had
begun selling several of Manet's portraits of
her by the mid-iSgos.

13. See Cachin et al., 1983, pp. 258-60;
Duret, 1902, pp. 38-39; Moreau-Nelaton,
1926, vol. 1, pp. 52-53, 94, and passim.

14. One example among many: "sous le toil
paternel, elle fut chargee de lui apprendre a
promener ses mains sur les touches d'un
piano." Moreau-Nelaton, 1926, vol. 1, p. 52.

15. Quoted in ibid., p. 53 (author's trans.).

16. See Georges Jeanniot's account of his visit
to Mme Manet in the company of John
Singer Sargent, reprinted in Moreau-
Nelaton, 1926, vol. 2, p. 107.

13 1

FIG. 10 Edouard Manet (French,
1832-1883), Reading Llllustre, 1879,
oil on canvas, 24'/^ * i97/s" (61.2 x
50.7 cm), The Art Institute of
Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis
Larned Coburn Memorial Collection

FIG. 11 Edouard Manet, sketch of
Mine Manet in a letter to Henri
Guerard, 1880, watercolor and ink,
private collection, Paris (courtesy
Wildenstein and Co.)

FIG. 12 Edouard Manet, Mme Manet,
1880, wash on graph paper, 6s/s x 5"
(16.8 x 12.7 cm), private collection,
Paris (courtesy Wildenstein and Co.)

FIG. 13 Edouard Manet, Heads of canvas, location unknown (courtesy

Women, 1880, ink on paper, 7"/.6 x The Pierpont Morgan Library, New

43/4" (19 5 x 12 cm), Staatliche York, Tabarant Collection)
Graphische Sammlung, Munich

FIG. 15 Edouard Manet, Portrait of
Manet's Mother, 1880, oil on canvas,
32'4 x 25V16" (82 x 65 cm), location
unknown

FIG. 16 Carte de visite of Suzanne
Manet, The Pierpont Morgan
Library, New York, Tabarant
Collection

FIG. 17 Edouard Manet, Mme Manet in the

Conservatory, 1879, oil on canvas,

3i'/s x 39V8" (81 x 100 cm), Nasjonalgalleriet,

Oslo

Edgar Degas

French, 1834-1917
Italian Woman, 1856-57
Watercolor and pencil on paper, 8'4 x
(20.8 x 10.4 cm)

provenance: Wildenstein and Co.,
New York; Mrs. Ira Haupt, New York.

exhibitions: Wildenstein and Co., New
York, "The Great Tradition of French
Painting," June-October 1939, no. 59;
Wildenstein and Co., New York, 'An Exhibi-
tion of French XIX Century Drawings,"
December 10, 1947- January 10, 1948, no. 12;
Wildenstein and Co., New York, 'A Loan
Exhibition of Degas," April 7-May 14, 1949,
no. 3.

literature: Camille Mauclair, Degas (New
York, 1941), pi. 23; Philippe Brame,
Theodore Reff, and Arlene Reff, Degas et son
oeuvre: A Supplement (New York and London,
1984), no. 10 (repro.).

NOTES

1. See the introduction by Henri Loyrette to
Villa Medici, Rome, Degas e I'ltalia,
December 1, 1984-February 10, 1985,

pp. 20-25.

2. Theodore Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar
Degas (Oxford, 1976), vol. 1, p. 72; quoted
in Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., Degas
(New York, 1988), p. 70.

3. Reff, 1976, vol. 1, p. 54 (author's trans.).

4. See, for example, Boggs et al., 1988, pp.
69-70, no. 11.

5. Reff, 1976, vol. 1, p. 72.

6. Moreau to his parents, March 3, 1858,
Musee Gustave Moreau, Paris; quoted in
Boggs et al., 1988, p. 65.

7. Villa Medici, 1984-85, pp. 22-24.

8. Both Chapu's illustrated letter and water-
color are in I he Musee de Melun.

9. Edmond About, Rome (lontemporaine
( Paris, 18(11), p. 81 (author's trans.).

136

FIG. 18 Edgar Degas (French,
1834-1917), Italian Peasant Woman,
1856, pencil and watercolor on
paper, Musee du Louvre, Paris,
Cabinet des Dessins

FIG. 19 Jules-Elie Delaunay
(French, 1828-1891), Italian Woman,
1858, pencil and watercolor on
paper, Musee des Beaux-Arts,
Nantes

Edgar Degas

French, 1834-1917
The Dancer, c. 1880
Signed lower right: Degas
Pastel, charcoal, and chalk on paper,
12V2 x ig'4" (31.8 x 49 cm)

provenance: P. Paulin, Paris; Antonio
Santamarina, Buenos Aires; sale, Sotheby's,
London, April 2, 1974, lot 17.

exhibitions: Museo Nacional de Bellas
Artes, Buenos Aires, "Escuela francesa siglos
XIX y XX," October 20-November 5, 1933,
no. 30; Galeria Viau, Buenos Aires, "Degas
et Lautrec," 1950, no. 4.

literature: Paul Lafond, Degas (Paris,
1919), repro. between pp. 22 and 23; Paul-
Andre Lemoisne, Degas et son oeuvre (Paris,
1946), vol. 2, no. 496 (repro.); Fiorella Min-
ervino, Tout I'oeuvre peint de Degas (Paris,
1974), no. 515 (repro.); Michel Strauss, ed.,
Impressionism and Modern Art: The Season at
Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973-74 (London and
New York, 1974), p. 21 (repro.).

NOTES

1. Paul Mant/, "Exposition des oeuvres des
artistes independants," Le Temps, April 14,
1880; quoted in the Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco and the National Gallery of
Art, Washington, D.C., The New Painting:
Impressionism, 1874-1886, January 17-July 6,
1986, p. 324.

2. For discussion of The Dance Lesson, see
George T. M. Shackelford, Degas: The Dancers
(Washington, DC, 1984), pp. 85-91.

3. Ibid., p. 88.

4. Musee d'Orsay Paris, and The Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art, New York. See Jean
Sutherland Boggs et al., Degas (New York,
1988), nos. 129 and 130.

5. By George Shackelford in conversation
with the author, October 1988. The drawing

137

is reproduced in Lilian Browse, Degas
Dancers (Boston, 1949), pi. 121, p. 379. The
drawing is dated to c. 1880-83 in her
catalogue.

6. Boggs et al., 1988, pp. 405-6. Here, with
some reservations, the charcoal drawing is
grouped with those made for the later
picture.

7. Paul-Andre Lemoisne, Degas et son oeuvre

( Paris, 1946; reprint, New York and London,
1984), vol. 3, no. 900.

8. For a similar example, see Richard R. Bret-
tell and Suzanne Folds McCullagh, Degas in
The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, 1984),
PP- 92-93-

9. Boggs et al., 1988, nos. 215 and 222.

10. Lillian Moore, "Practice Clothes^Then
and Now," The Ballet Annual, vol. 14, p. 123.

11. Quoted in George Jeanniot, "Souvenirs
sur Degas," La Revue Universelle, vol. 55
(October 15, 1933), p. 154 (author's trans.).

12. For example, see the album in the Dance
Division of the New York Public Library, La
Danse, vingt dessins de Paul Renouard: Trans-
pose's en harmonies de couleurs (Paris, 1892), in
which the publishers announce, rather
grandly, "We have tried to capture the special
lighting of the theatre and the dance classes
of the opera."

fig. 20 Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917),
Ballet Scene, 1898, pastel on cardboard, 3o'4
x 4334" (76.8 x 111.2 cm), National Gallery of
Art, Washington, DC, Chester Dale
Collection

FIG. 21 Edgar Degas, The Dance Lesson,
1878-79, oil on canvas, 15 x 34'4" (38 x 86.3
cm), Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon,
Upperville, Va.

FIG. 22 Edgar Degas, Standing
Dancer Fastening Her Sash, c. 1873,
wash and gouache on paper, 21V8 x
15" (55 x 38 cm), private collection,
Paris (courtesy Galerie Schmit,
Paris)

FIG. 23 Edgar Degas, Standing
Dancer Fastening Her Sash,
c. 1880-83, charcoal heightened
with while chalk on paper, 19 x 12"
(48.3 x 30.5 cm), location unknown I

138

FIG. 24 Edgar Degas The Dancing Lesson,
1880, oil on canvas, i5'/2 x 34^4" (39.4 x 88.4
cm), Sterling and Francine Clark Art Insti-
tute, Williamstown, Mass.

FIG. 25 Edgar Degas, Dancer with a Fan,
1880, charcoal and pastel heightened with
white chalk on paper, 24 x i6l/4" (61 x 41.9
cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer

FIG. 26 Edgar Degas, The Ballet Class, 1881,
oil on canvas, 32'/s x 3o'/8" (81.6 x 76.5 cm),
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The W. P.
Wilstach Collection

FIG. 27 Paul Renouard (French, 1845-1924),
colored lithograph from La Danse, vingt
dessins de Paul Renouard: Transposes en
harmonies de couleurs (Paris, 1892), The New
York Public Library, Astor Lenox and Tilden
Foundations

Edgar Degas

French, 1834-1917

Race Horses, 1885-88

Pastel on panel, n'/s x 16" (30.2 x 40.5 cm)

provenance: Theodore Duret, Paris;
Duret sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris,
March 19, 1894, lot 14.

exhibitions: Wildenstein and Co., New
York, "Degas' Racing World," March 21-April
27, 1968, no. 13, introduction, n.p.; The Tate
Gallery, London, "The Annenberg Collec-
tion," September 2-October 8, 1969, no. 11.

literature: Paul-Andre Lemoisne, Degas
et son oeuvre (Paris, 1946; reprint, New York
and London, 1984), vol. 3, no. 852 (repro.);
Jean Bouret, Degas (New York, 1966), repro.
p. 97; Jacques Lassaigne, Tout Voeuvre peint de
Degas, translated by Fiorella Minervino
(Paris, 1974), no. 706 (repro.); Antoine Ter-
rasse, Degas (New York, 1983), repro. pp.
52-53; Jean Sutherland Boggs, "Degas at the
Museum: Works in the Philadelphia Museum
of Art and John G.Johnson Collection," Phil-
adelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 81, no.
34(1 (spring 1985), n. 48; Jean Sutherland
Boggs et al., Degas (New York, 1988), p. 268.

NOTES

1. See Wildenstein and Co., New York, Degas'
Racing World, March 21-April 27, 1968; Rich-
ard Thomson, The Private Degas ( London,
1987), pp. 92-100; and Denys Sutton, Edgar
Degas: Life and Work (New York, 1986),

pp. 135-60.

2. Paul-Andre Lemoisne, Degas et son oeuvre,
4 vols. (Paris, 1946-49; reprint, New York
and London, 1984).

3. Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., Degas (New
York, 1988), p. 268, where it is mistakenly
described as an oil painting on panel.

4. For example, Phillippe Brame and
Theodore Reff, Degas et son oeuvre: A Supple-
ment (New York, 1984), no. 126: "Jockey, De

139

Dos," c. 1889, charcoal, pastel, and oil on
wood, private collection, Switzerland; and the
Dancer with Raised Arms, 1891, formerly in
the collection of Gisele Rueff-Beghin (sale,
Sotheby's, London, November 29, 1988, lot 4,
where it is catalogued as pastel and charcoal
on panel); see Douglas W. Druick and Peter
Zegers, "Scientific Realism: 1873-1881," in
Boggs et al., 1988, pp. 197-211.

5. See Michael Pantazzi's entry on Race Horses
at Longchamp, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
in Boggs et al., 1988, pp. 159-60.

6. Thomson, 1987, pp. 93-95; Henri
Loyrette in Villa Medici, Rome, Degas e I'lta-
lia, December 1, 1984-February 10, 1985,
pp. 32-34. It should be noted that the first
mutation from the study after Gozzoli to a
scene from the track occurs in Degas's fine
draw ing At the Races, c. i860, in the Sterling
and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williams-
town, Mass.

7. The sanguine drawing is reproduced in
Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, Catalogue des
tableaux, pastels, et dessins par Edgar Degas et
provenant de son atelier, March 8-April 9,
1919, vol. 4, p. 202, no. 237. See Boggs et al.,
1988, pp. 266-67.

8. Among them are the erect jockey in pro-
file on the steed after Gozzoli that appears in
the center of Race Horses, and a rearing horse
in the background at an angle to the frieze of
jockeys, which occupies a space of its own at
the left in Race Horses. See Boggs et al., 1988,
pp. 101-2. Race Horses at Longchamp (Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston), painted in 1871 and
thought to have been reworked in 1874,
developed the striking motif of the paired
jockeys, seen from the rear, who step into t he
composition, which Degas drew upon and
rearranged in this pastel (Boggs et al., 1988,
pp. 159-60).

9. Boggs et al., 1988, pp. 268-69. Race Horses
(fig. 32, private collection) was actually
painted by 1872, since it was in Ferdinand
Bischoffsheim's collection by May 1 of that
year when he exchanged it with Durand-
Ruel. The baritone and collector Jean-Bap-
tiste Faure returned the painting to Degas,

who reworked it between 1876 and 1878.
This information was supplied by Michael
Pantazzi from the Durand-Ruel Archives.

10. Theodore Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar
Degas, 2nd rev. ed. (New York, 1985), vol. 1,
p. 143, Notebook 35, fols. 17, 19.

11. Ibid., where the sketches are described as
studies for the pastel in Zurich (Lemoisne,
1984, vol. 3, no. 850) and the painting in
Providence (Lemoisne, 1984, vol. 3, no. 889);
see Ronald Pickvance in Wildenstein and Co.,
1968, no. 49. Lepic's noble bearing and full
beard are features that are not shared by the
squat, ferret-faced jockey in the Zurich pas-
tel, despite the kinship of pose. The drawing
of Lepic (fig. 33), which has been dated to
1882, is far closer to a variant of the Zurich
composition, Before the Race, 1882-88 (oil on
paper on panel, Collection of Mrs. John Hay
Whitney), which in turn is similar in handling
and atmosphere to the Annenberg Race
Horses.

Even the landscape in Race Horses may be
related to nature studies Degas had made
decades before. The rolling hills and church
tower among a cluster of old buildings com-
pare with his views of Exmes (1861, Biblio-
theque Nationale, Paris, Notebook 18, p. 169),
a medieval village in Normandy near the
French stud farm at Haras-du-Pin. Degas
made his first visit there in September-
October 1861, when he stayed with his
friends the Valpincons at their country house
at Menil-Hubert. See Reff, 1985, vol. 1, p. 98,
Notebook 18.

12. Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, Catalogue des
tableaux et pastels composant la collection de M.
Theodore Duret, March 19, 1894, pp. 13-17,
nos. 9-16.

13. Lemoisne, 1984, vol. 2, no. 503, vol. 3,
nos. 774, 1107, where the provenance to
Duret is not recorded.

14. In conversation with the author, Mic hael
Pantazzi noted that Duret acquired a dancer
from Durand-Ruel for 2,000 francs, on
December 21, probably in 1888 (Durand-
Ruel stock no. 1699). The year is not given,
but Degas had deposited a dancer with

Durand-Ruel on August 6, 1888.
15. Julie Manet noted in her diary that
Manet's portrait of her mother, Repose, did
not make more than 11,000 francs. See Jour-
nal (1893-1899) (Paris, 1979), p. 30, where
she also noted, "In this collection we also saw
Race Horses by Degas and Dancers so beauti-
fully drawn by this great master" (author's
trans.).

Attending the sale at Georges Petit's gal-
lery, Degas is reported to have berated
Duret: "You glorify yourself as having been
one of our friends. You have pasted up signs
all over Paris: Duret Sale. I won't shake hands
with you. Besides, your auction will fail." Dan-
iel Halevy recorded Degas's acerbic com-
ments in My Friend Degas, translated by Mina
Curtiss (Middletown, Conn., 1964), p. 94.
Three works by Degas were purchased by
Durand-Ruel, while the Annenberg pastel,
which fell below Duret's reserve of 2,000
francs, nonetheless fetched the decent sum
of 1,400 francs. These prices and estimates
are taken from the sales catalogue annotated
by the Philadelphia collector John G.John-
son, who was present at the Duret sale (John
G.Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art).

140

fig. 28 Edgar Degas (French, 1843-1917),
after Benozzo Gozzoli (Italian, c. 1421-1497),
The Journey of the Magi, 1859-60, pencil on
paper, ios/,6 x 12" (26.2 x 30.5 cm), The
Harvard University Art Museums,
Cambridge, Mass., Gift of Henry S. Bowers

FIG. 29 Edgar Degas, Horse, mid-i86os,
sanguine on paper, y'A x io"/i6" (19 x 27 cm),
location unknown (from Galerie Georges
Petit, Paris, Catalogue des tableaux, pastels, et
dessins par Edgar Degas et provenant de son
atelier, March 8-April 9, 1919, vol. 4, p. 202,
no. 237)

fig. 30 Edgar Degas, The Patriarch Joseph of
Constantinople and His Attendants, after
Benozzo Gozzoli, The Journey of the Magi,
1859-60, pencil on paper, 10 x 12*4" (25.5 x
32.6 cm), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

FIG. 31 Edgar Degas, Three Studies of a
Mounted Jockey, c. 1866-68, pencil on paper,
7l/» x io'4" (19 x 26 cm), The Harvard
University Art Museums, Cambridge, Mass.,
Grenville L. Winthrop Bequest

FIG. 32 Edgar Degas, Race Horses, 1871-72,
reworked 1876-78, oil on panel, 12V8 x 157/8"
(32.5 x 40.4 cm), private collection

FIG. 33 Edgar Degas, Portrait of
Baron Lepic, 1882, black chalk on
paper, nVs x 9" (30.2 x 22.8 cm),
private collection (courtesy Wilden-
stein and Co.)

141

Edgar Degas

French, 1834-1917

At the Milliners, 1881

Signed lower right: Degas

Pastel on five pieces of wove paper
joined together, backed onto another
layer of paper and mounted on linen,
27*4 x 27'4" (70 x 70 cm)

provenance: Delivered by the artist to
Durand-Ruel, Paris, on October 12, 1881;
purchased from Durand-Ruel by Charles
Ephrussi, April 21, 1882; returned on deposit
by Charles Ephrussi to Durand-Ruel on April
24, 1895; purchased by Durand-Ruel, April
7, 1896; Joseph Durand-Ruel Collection;
inherited by his daughter, Mrs. d'Alayer de
Costemore d Arc, New York.

exhibitions: Grafton Galleries, London,
'A Selection from the Pictures by Boudin,
Cezanne, Degas, Manet, Monet ... Exhibited
by Messrs. Durand-Ruel," January-February
1905, no. 65; Galeries Georges Petit, Paris,
"Exposition Degas," April 12-May 2, 1924,
no. 150; Galeries Durand-Ruel, Paris, "Quel-
ques oeuvres importantes de Corot a van
( iogh," May 11- June 16, 1934, no. 10; Durand-
Ruel Galleries, New York, "The Four
(.ic.it Impressionists: Cezanne, Degas, Ren-
oir, Manet," March 27-April 13, 1940, no. 10;
Durand-Ruel Galleries, New York, "Pastels by
Degas," March 1-31, 1943, no. 7;
Durand-Ruel Calleries, New York, "Degas,"
November 10-29, '947- no- Philadelphia
Museum ol An, "Exhibition of Philadelphia
Private Collectors," summer 1963 (no cata-
logue); rhe rate Gallery, London, "The
Annenberg Collection," September 2-
October 8, 1969, no. 12.

literature: Georges Grappc, Edgar
Degas, L'art et le beau, 3rd year, vol. 1 ( Paris,
1908), p. 58; Paul Jamot, Degas ( Paris, 1924),
no. 68 (repro.); Rene Huyghe, "Degas ou la
fiction realiste," L'Amour de l'art, no. 7 (July

1931), p. 282, fig. 23; R.H. Wilenski, Modern
French Painters (New York, 1940), p. 333; M.
Rebatet, Degas (Paris, 1944), pi. 60; Paul-
Andre Lemoisne, Degas et son oeuvre ( Paris,
1946; reprint, New York and London, 1984),
vol. 3, no. 827 (repro.); Robert Rey, Degas
(Paris, 1952), pi. 52; Pierre Cabanne, Edgar
Degas (Paris and New York, 1958), no. log
(repro.); Jean Bouret, Degas (New York,
1965), repro. p. 169; Jacques Lassaigne, Tout
I'oeuvre peint de Degas, translated by Fiorella
Minervino (Paris, 1974), no. 637 (repro.);
Rene Huyghe, La Relive du reel: Impression-
nisme, symbolisme (Paris, 1974), fig. 77;
Antoine Terrasse, Degas (New York, 1983),
fig. 2; Richard R. Brettell and Suzanne Folds
McCullagh, Degas in The Art Institute of Chi-
cago (Chicago and New York, 1984), p. 133;
Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, Degas
(New York, 1988), repro. p. 129; Jean Suther-
land Boggs et al., Degas (New York, 1988),
P- 397 f'g- 210.

NOTES

1. See Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., Degas
(New York, 1988), p. 397, fig. 210.

2. See Gary Tinterow's analysis of the devel-
opment of Degas's style in the 1880s, in ibid.,
PP- 363-74-

3. Ibid., p. 365.

4. Michael Pantazzi, who was responsible for
discovering much of the new information
presented in this entry, first suggested this in
conversation with the author, November
1988.

5. For two related milliners, see Paul-Andre
Lemoisne, Degas et son oeuvre (Paris, 194b;
reprint, New York and London, 1984), vol. 2,
nos. 683 and 693. See Gary Tinterow's dis-

( ussion in Boggs et al., 1988, pp. 37b-77-

6. Degas's revealing letter to his good friend,
Evariste de Valernes, is in Marcel Guerin, ed.,
Lettres de Degas ( Paris, 1945), p. 179, dated to
October 2b [1890] (author's trans.).

7. Mirbeau's extremely interesting text,

"Notes sur l'art: Degas," first published in La
France, November 15, 1884, is reprinted in
Gary Tinterow, "Mirbeau on Degas: A Little-
Known Article of 1884," The Burlington Mag-
azine, vol. 130 (March 1988), p. 230 (author's
trans.).

8. Degas used this term, in English, in a letter
probably from April/May 1879 to Bracque-
mond. See Lettres de Degas, 1945, p. 43.
g. Tinterow's observation that women in the
milliner's series are defined to a "remarkable
degree" by their hats (Boggs et al., 1988, p.
400) does not apply to the Annenberg pas-
tel and serves to emphasize its enigmatic
qualities. In recent literature, it has been
wrongly assumed that Degas is showing a
client and a shop assistant in this pastel; see,
for example, Richard R. Brettell and
Suzanne Folds McCullagh, Degas in The Art
Institute of Chicago (Chicago and New York,
1984), p. 133; and, more generally, Eunice
Lipton, Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of
Women and Modern Life (Berkeley, 1986), p.
153, "there is not a single painting of a milli-
nery shop by Degas which does not include
some reference to the milliner."
10. Zola described the large room where
clients tried on the latest fashions as compa-
rable to "the commonplace salon of a hotel,"
in which the shop assistants paraded "with-
out ever sitting down on any of the dozen or
so chairs reserved exclusively for the clients"
(Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, ed. Gar-
nier-Flammarion [Paris, 1971], p. 122). When
the vindictive supervisor Bourdoncle needs
to find reasons to lay off assistants during the
habitually quiet months, being found seated
is a sufficient infraction for dismissal: "You

were sitting down go and pack your bags!"

Ibid., p. 182.

Eugene Manet informed his wife in a letter
of December 1891 that Degas had ironically
suggested that Chat pentier produce a special
edition of Au Bonheur des Dames for New
Year's Day with samples of ribbons and lace
trimmings attached. Denis Rouart, ed., The

142

Correspondence of Berthe Morisot with Her
Friends Manet, Puvis de Chavannes, Degas,
Monet, Renoir, and Mallarme, translated by
Betty W. Hubbard (London, 1968), p. 188.

11. For Huysmans's review of the Fifth Impres-
sionist Exhibition of 1880, first published in
L'Art Moderne, 1883, see J. K. Huysmans, L'Art
moderne: Certains, Fins de Siecles (Paris, 1975),
p. 130.

12. Theodore Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar
Degas (London, 1976; 2nd rev. ed., New York,
1985), vol. 1, pp. 37, 39.

13. Jacques-Emile Blanche, Propos de peintre, I,
De David d Degas (Paris, 1919), quoted by
Tinterow in Boggs et al., 1988, p. 374.

14. Quoted in Tinterow, ig88, p. 230 (see
note 7 above).

15. Charles Ephrussi, "Exposition des Artistes
Independants," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 22nd
year, 2nd period, vol. 21 (May 1, 1880), p. 486
(author's trans.).

16. Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli
(Berkeley, 1978), vol. 2, pp. 60-61. The sale
was made in February 1882 and Ephrussi
published the frescoes in the Gazette des
Beaux-Arts later that year.

17. With the exception of Boggs et al., 1988,
and Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge,
Degas (New York, 1988), all previous litera-
ture has agreed in dating the Annenberg
pastel to 1885, the year Durand-Ruel must
have assigned to it when At the Milliner's was
first publicly exhibited in 1905. Gary Tin-
terow has dated it to between 1882-84
(Boggs et al., 1988, p. 397), and this has been
followed by Gordon and Forge.

18. See Philippe Kolb and Jean Adhemar,
"Charles Ephrussi (1849-1905), ses secre-
taires: Laforgue, A. Renan, Proust," Gazette
des Beaux-Arts, 126th year, 6th period,

vol. 103(1984), pp. 29-41.

19. Edmond and Jules Goncourt,/oMrrca/:
Memoires de la vie litte'raire, edited by Robert
Ricatte (Paris, 1956), vol. 3, p. 116 (author's
trans.).

20. Lettres de Degas, 1945, pp. 59-60 (author's
trans.). The text is not entirely clear: in refer-
ring to "le tableau d' Ephrussi" Degas could
simply mean Ephrussi's painting, rather than
the painting of Ephrussi (i.e. his portrait).

21. The letter is not dated but was presumably
written in early June 1880. Ibid., p. 48.

22. Ibid., pp. 66-67; Degas's letter to M.
Blanche, dated 1882, concludes, "Write to
Ephrussi: he will tell you what to write, he
will tell us how to act" (author's trans.).

23. Rouart, ed., ig68, p. 127. The letter is
from late March/April 1882, the time of the
Seventh Impressionist Exhibition. Compare
Boggs et al., 1988, p. 381.

24. Michael Pantazzi has suggested that the
unfinished "tableau d'Ephrussi" might relate
to the pastel of the Seated Man Reading,
Lemoisne, 1984, vol. 2, no. 655, which is
clearly a portrait. The 'Assyrian" profile of
the sitter aligns well with the elegantly
bearded figure in Leon Bonnat's portrait of
him (c. 1895, private collection, Paris);
Laforgue remembered Ephrussi as having "a
finely trimmed beard"; and Kolb and Adhe-
mar, 1984, p. 29, noted that he used to write
during the day in a Chinese dressing gown,
which also appears in this pastel.

25. Oeuvres completes de Jules Laforgue (Paris,
1917-30), vol. 4, p. 42, letter dated December
5, 1881.

26. Boggs et al., 1988, pp. 165-66.

27. The point is also made in Kolb and
Adhemar, 1984, pp. 31-32.

28. For reference to the Durand-Ruel stock
books I am greatly indebted to Michael
Pantazzi, who placed this unpublished mate-
rial at my disposal.

29. Durand-Ruel, Paris, "Livre de Stock,"
1880-82, October 12, 1881, "no. 1923, coin
de salon"; Durand-Ruel, Paris, Journal, Feb-
ruary 2, 1880-November 30, 1881, fol. 125,
Durand-Ruel Archives, Paris, "a Degas
n[otre] achat de s.[on] pastel, no. 1923."

30. Durand-Ruel, Paris, Journal, December 1,

1881-October 15, 1889, fol. 29, April 21, 1882,
"Ephrussi s.[on] achat d'un pastel de Degas,
no. 1923, 2,000 f."

31. Durand-Ruel, Paris, "Tableaux Recus en
Depot," July 1893-October 1895, April 24,
1895, "no. 8648, Conversation. Pastel."

32. Durand-Ruel, Paris, Journal, June 1, 1893-
January 31, i8gg, fol. 311, "7 April, i8g6, a
Ephrussi, 11 av. d'lena, achete La Conversa-
tion/La Conversation [crossed out] Chez La
Modiste, paye sa facture de ce jour, 8000 f.";
Durand-Ruel, Paris, "Tableaux Existant au 31
Aoiit igoi," "Chez La Modiste, 7 April i8g6,
40,000 f."

33. Boggs et al., ig88, p. 400. If the Chicago
Millinery Shop is regarded as the terminus of
this series, the Annenberg pastel has claims
as its starting point.

34. Ibid., p. 248, n. 5, where the identifica-
tion of the work exhibited in 1876 with Mme
Jeantaud before a Mirror ( Musee d'Orsay,
Paris) is rejected on the basis of Salon
criticism.

35. Ibid., pp. 320-22, 337-39. 334-45-

36. See the introduction by Colette Becker to
Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, Garnier-
Flammarion ed. (Paris, ig7i), p. 18.

37. Lettres de Degas, ig45, pp. 5g-6o. Mary
Cassatt's famous comment that Degas used
her as a model "when he finds the movement
difficult, and the model cannot seem to get
his idea" could also apply to At the Milliner's
(see Louisine W. Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty:
Memoirs of a Collector [New York, 1961],

p. 258). For Cassatt's portrait of Lydia wear-
ing comparable gloves, see The Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco and the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, The New
Painting: Impressionism, 1874 -1886, January
17- July 6, 1986, p. 358.

38. George Moore, "Memoirs of Degas," The
Burlington Magazine, vol. 32 (January 1918),
p. 64.

3g. M. Griffith, "Paris Dressmakers," The
Strand Magazine, vol. 8 (July-December

1894), pp. 744-51. I am grateful for this ref-
erence to Dilys Blum, Curator of Costume
and Textiles at the Philadelphia Museum
of Art.

40. Paul Gauguin's Intimate Journals, trans-
lated bv Van Wyck Brooks (New York, 1936),
p. 133. Joseph Rishel kindly provided this
reference.

41. Degas referred to "le jeune et beau Sick-
ert" in a letter to Ludovic Halevy, dated Sep-
tember 1885; see Lettres de Degas, 1945, p.
109; Walter Sickert. "Degas," The Burlington
Magazine, vol. 31 (November 1917), p. 185.

fig. 35 The white lines indicate
the separate pieces of paper from
which Degas built his composition
for At the Milliner's

fig. 37 Edgar Degas, At the
Milliner's, 1882, pastel on paper,
275/3 x 2734" (70.2 x 70.5 cm), The
Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., Gift of-
Mrs. David M. Levy

fig. 34 Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917), At
the Milliner's, 1882, pastel on paper, 29V8 x
33s/8" (75-9 x 84.8 cm), Thyssen-Bornemisza
Collection, Lugano

FIG. 36 Edgar Degas, At the
Milliner's, 1882, pastel on paper,
255/8 x 195/8" (65 x 50 cm), location
unknown

FIG. 38 Leonardo da Vinci (Italian,
1452-1519), The Virgin and Child with
Saint Anne, c. 1510, oil on panel, 6CWs
x 51V&" (168 x 130 cm), Musee du
Louvre, Paris

144

FIG. 3g Domenico Ghirlandaio
(Italian, 1449-1494), The Visitation,
oil on panel, 673^ x 65" (172 x 165
cm), Musee du Louvre, Paris

FIG. 41 The Young Ladies' Room in
Mr. Felix's Establishment, photo-
graph, 1894 {The Strand Magazine,
vol. 8 [July-December 1894], p. 749)

fig. 40 Mary Cassatt (American,
1844-1926), Lydia in the Garden, 1880, oil on
canvas, 26 x 37" (66 x 94 cm), The Metro-
politan Museum of Art, N.Y, Gift of Mrs.
Gardner Cassatt

FIG. 42 The Fashion Hall in Mr.
Felix's Establishment, photograph,
1894 {The Strand Magazine, vol. 8
[July-December 1894], p. 749)

Berthe Morisot

French, 1841-1895
The Pink Dress, c. 1870
Signed, indistinctly, lower right: Berthe
Mor. . .

Oil on canvas, 21V2 x 26'/4" (54.6 x 67.2 cm)

provenance: The sitter; Antonio Santa-
marina, Buenos Aires, by 1933; [Santamarina
Collection] sale, Sotheby's, London, April 2,
1974, lot 13.

exhibitions: Museo Nacional de Bellas
Artes, Buenos Aires, "Escuela francesa siglos
XIX y XX," October 20-November 5, 1933,
no. 84; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes,
Buenos Aires, "La Pintura Francesa — de
David a nuestros dias — Oleos, Dibujos y
Acuarelas," October-December, 1939, no.
103; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos
Aires, "El Impresionismo Frances en las
Colecciones Argentinas," September-
October, 1962, no. 38.

LITERATURE: Jacques-Emile Blanche, "Les
Dames de la Grande-Rue," Les Ecrits Nou-
veaux, January-February 1920, pp. 19-20;
Monique Angoulvent, Berthe Morisot (Paris,
1933), p. 120, no. 50; Rene Huyghe, La Pein-
ture francaise de 1800 a nos jours (Paris, 1939),
p. 48 (repro.); Marie-Louise Bataille and
Georges Wildenstein, Berthe Morisot: Cata-
logue des peintures, pastels, et aquarelles (Paris,
1961), no. 31, fig. 104; Denis Rouart, ed., The
Correspondence of Berthe Morisot with Her
Friends Manet, Puvis de Chavannes, Degas,
Monet, Renoir, and Mallarme { London, 1986),
p. 216, n. 46; The Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco and the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC, The New Painting: Impres-
sionism, 1874-1886, January 17- July 6, 1986,
p. 354, n. 58; Charles E Stuckey, William P.
Scott, and Suzanne G Lindsay, Berthe Morisot:
Impressionist {New York, 1987), pp. 26-27.

145

NOTES

1. See Charles F. Stuckey, William P. Scott,
and Suzanne G. Lindsay, Berthe Morisot:
Impressionist (New York, 1987), p. 16;
Stephane Mallarme, preface, in Durand-
Ruel, Paris, Berthe Morisot (Madame Eugene
Manet): Exposition de son oeuvre, March 5-21,
1896, p. 7. Bill Scott, Suzanne Lindsay, and
Chittima Amornpichetkul have generously
shared both ideas and unpublished material
on Morisot with me.

2. Denys Sutton, "Jacques-Emile Blanche:
Painter, Critic, and Memorialist," Gazette des
Beaux-Arts, 130th year, 4th period, vol. 111
(January-February 1988), pp. 159-72.

3. Jacques-Emile Blanche, "Les Dames de la
Grande-Rue: Berthe Morisot," Les Ecrits Nou-
veaux, January-February 1920, pp. 16-24;
Jacques-Emile Blanche, Passy (Paris, 1928),
especially chapter 4, "La Villa Fodor," pp.
50-51; see also Monique Angoulvent, Berthe
Morisot ( Paris, 1933), pp. 42-44.

4. Blanche, 1920, p. 19.

5. Ibid., pp. 19-20.

6. Ibid., p. 20.

7. Mallarme, in Durand-Ruel, 1896, p. 6.

8. Blanche, 1920, p. 18; Blanche, 1928, p. 52.

9. Blanche, 1920, p. 18.

10. Ibid., p. 20.

11. "Certain jour de 1867, Mile Marguerite
me ramenant par la rue Franklin, . . . presenta
le tout petit garcon que j'etais a 'mademoi-
selle Berthe,' qui, assise sur un pliant, peig-
nait un pastel en plein air." Ibid., p. 19.

12. In the notes by Kathleen Adler and
Tamar Garb accompanying the most recent
English edition of Morisot's correspondence
the authors stated incorrectly that Mile
Valentine posed for The Pink Dress. Denis
Rouart, ed., The (Correspondence of Berthe
Morisot with Her Eamily and Her Friends Manet,
Puvis de Ghavannes, Degas, Monet, Renoir, and
Mallarme (London, 1986), p. 219, n. 46. For
Valentine's brief career as Manet's model see
ibid., pp. 51-52; and Charles S. Moffett's

146

entry on In the Garden in Francoise Cachin,
Charles S. Moffett, and Michel Melot, Manet,
1832-1883 (New York, 1983), pp. 318-20.

13. "Mairie du i6e Arrondissement de Paris,
Acte de Manage," Paris, November 10, 1897,
"Himmes et Carre," p 879.

14. "Les dits futurs, allies au degre de beau-
frere et belle-soeur, munis d une dispense
obtenue du Governement, a la date du 12
Octobre dernier." Ibid. Louise-Valentine
Carre had died on August 25, 1896, age
forty-nine. This information was very kindly
supplied by Bill Scott, who checked the
records of the Passy Cemetery.

15. Julie Manet, Journal (i8g^-i8gg): Sajeu-
nesse parmi les peintres impressionnistes et les
hommes de lettres (Paris, 1979), p. 138, entry
dated October 25, 1897 (author's trans.).
Compare her comments following the wed-
ding ceremony: "Le manage Himmes-Carre
m'a produit une triste impression, je plaignais
les conjoints; puis j'ai pense a l'emotion que
me produiraient les manages de Paule et de
Jeannie." Ibid., p. 140, entry dated
November 11, 1897.

16. Mme Rouart-Valery's mother, Jeanne
Gobillard (Morisot's niece), recorded Mme
Himmes's consternation in a journal entry for
March 6, 1919; letter of Mme Rouart-Valery
to the author, June 28, 1988.

17. "Mairie du i6e Arrondissement de Paris,
Acte de Deces," Paris, January 31, 1935,
"Carre, Veuve Himmes"; ibid., "Himmes,"
August 31, 1917.

18. "Ne croyez pas, chere madame, que je
fusse si monstrueux que d'avoir note ces
details a l'age que j'avais sous l'Empire."
Blanche, 1920, p. 20.

19. Stuckey, Scott, and Lindsay, 1987, pp.
26-27; Cachin et al., 1983, pp. 258-60.

20. Rouart, ed., 1986, p. 30.

21. See Cachin et al., 1983, pp. 258-60.

22. For Mme Morisot's letter to her daughter
Ed ma, see Rouart, ed., 1986, p. 34. The issue
is complicated by the vagueness of the com-

ment: Mme Morisot might be referring to
Manet's Mme Manet at the Piano (Musee
d'Orsay, Paris), though this has been dated by
Cachin to 1867/68.

23. Cachin et al, 1983, p. 315.

24. Stuckey, Scott, and Lindsay, 1987,
PP- 31-33-

25. Blanche, 1920, pp. 18, 20.

26. "Do you want to send the pastels you did
in London? You might add the one of
Marguerite Carre." Rouart, ed., 1986, p. 109.
In the end Eugene Manet read the stipula-
tions more carefully: only paintings were
accepted. This pastel was last recorded by
Angoulvent in the collection of the Galerie
L. Dru, Paris. See Angoulvent, 1933, no. 51,
p. 120.

27. Angoulvent, 1933, no. 88, p. 122; Manet,
1979, p. 85, where Julie described the paint-
ing as "Mile Carre en blanc, tres gentille."
The best reproduction is found in Wilden-
stein, New York, Loan Exhibition of Paintings:
Berthe Morisot, November 3-December 10,
ig6o, no. 8. The identity of the young
woman as Marguerite Carre is confirmed
with absolute certainty by an entry in one of
Julie Manet's unpublished notebooks (private
collection, Paris), which lists the painting as
representing "Mine Himmes alors Marguerite
Carre." Information graciously supplied by
Chittima Amornpichetkul.

28. See Rouart, ed., 1986, p. 116, where the
traditional view is stated. Reservations were
first made in the annotations to the Sixth
Impressionist Exhibition catalogue reprinted
in The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
and the National Gallery of Art, Washing-
ton, DC, The Neiv Painting: Impressionism,
1874-1886, January 17- July 6, 1986, p. 354.

29. Nina de Villars, "Varietes: Exposition des
artistes independants," Le Gourrier du Soir,
April 23, 1881, "Mme Berthe Morisot envoie
une delicieuse Eemme en rose, blonde, vapo-
reuse, les yeux aussi bleus que les turquoises
qui ornent ses mignonnes oreilles." I am

grateful to Suzanne Lindsay for bringing this
passage to my attention.
30. Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, "Exposition
Berthe Morisot," April 23-May 10, 1902, no.
46; Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, "Cent oeuvres
de Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)," November
7-22, 1919, no. 59. For Mme Hubbard see
Stuckey, Scott, and Lindsay, 1987, pp. 62-64;
The Portrait of Mme Heude is reproduced in
Marie-Louise Bataille and George Wilden-
stein, Berthe Morisot: Catalogue des peintures,
pastels, et aquarelles (Paris, 1961), no. 21,
fig. 105.

FIG. 44 Edouard Manet, Reading, 1865-73,
oil on canvas, 24 x 29'4" (61 x 74 cm), Musee
d'Orsay, Paris

FIG. 46 Berthe Morisot, Portrait of
Jeanne-Marie, 1871, oil on canvas,
215/8 x 173/8" (55 x 54 cm), private
collection, Paris (courtesy Robert
Schmit, Paris)

fig. 43 Edouard Manet (French,
1832-1883), In the Garden, 1870, oil on
canvas, 17'/* x 2i'4" (44-5 x 54 cm), The
Shelburne Museum, Vt.

FIG. 45 Berthe Morisot (French, 1841-1895),
Two Seated Women (The Sisters), c. 1869-75, oil
on canvas, 20V2 x 32" (52.1 x 81.3 cm),
National Gallery of Art , Washington, D.C.,
Gift of Mrs. Charles S. Carstairs

FIG. 47 Berthe Morisot, Young
Woman in a Ballgown, 1873, oil on
canvas, 14'/* x i2'4" (36.8 x 31.8 cm),
private collection, Paris (courtesy
Wildenstein and Co.)

147

Henri Fantin-Latour

French, 1836-1904
Asters and Fruit on a Table, 1868
Signed and dated upper right: Fantin 68
Oil on canvas, 22V8 x 2i5/s"
(56.8 x 54.9 cm)

provenance: Mrs. Mason, London; Alex.
Reid 8c Lefevre, London; Ian McNichol, Glas-
gow; Mrs. Breminer, London; Scott & Fowles,
Montreal; Gustav Ring, Washington, D.C.;
Wildenstein & Co., New York; Alex. Reid 8c
Lefevre, London; Paul Rosenberg 8c Co.,
New York; Norton Simon, Pasadena, Califor-
nia; Alex. Reid 8c Lefevre, London; private
collection, Switzerland; Alex. Reid 8c Lefevre,
London; private collection; Acquavella Gal-
leries, New York.

NOTES

1. A Jullien, Fantin-Latour, sa vie et ses amities:
Lettres inedites et souvenirs personnels (Paris,
1909), p. 23 (author's translation).

2. See Jules-Antoine Castagnary, Salons (1857-
18-9), 2 vols. (Paris, 1892), vol. 2, p. 161.

3. Quoted from Douglas Druick and Michel
Hoog, Fantin-Latour (Ottawa, 1983), p. 114.

Henri Fantin-Latour

French, 1836-1904

Roses in a Bowl, 1883

Signed and dated lower left: Fantin 83

Oil on canvas, iis4 x 16V8" (29.9 x 41.6 cm)

provenance: Mrs. Edwin Edwards, Lon-
don; Carlos Guinle, Rio de Janeiro.

exhibition: The Tate Gallery, London,
"The Annenberg Collection," September 2-
October 8, 1969, no. 13.

LITERATURE: Mme Fantin-Latour, ed., Cat-
alogue de I'oeuvre complet (1849-1904) de
Fantin-Latour (Paris, 1911), no. 1126.

NOTES

1. Frederick Wedmore, Whistler and Others
(New York, 1906), pp. 36-37.

2. Douglas Druick and Michel Hoog, Fantin-
Latour (Ottawa, 1983), pp. 13, 18, 113-18, and
passim.

3. Ibid., pp. 256-57.

4. Jacques-Emile Blanche, "Fantin-Latour,"
Revue de Paris, May 15, 1906, p. 311; cited in
ibid., p. 265.

5. Ibid., p. 266, This telling comment from a
letter Fantin wrote to Edwards on May 26,
1875, is pertinent in connection with Roses in
a Bowl.

6. As recalled by Paul Poujaud. See Marcel
Guerin, ed., Lettres de Degas (Paris, 1945),
p. 256 (author's trans.).

7. Blanche, 1906; cited in Michel Fare, La
Nature morte en France (Geneva, 1962), vol. 1,
p. 269.

8. John W. McCoubrey, "The Revival of Char-
din in French Still-Life Painting, 1850-1870,"
The Art Bulletin, vol. 46, no. 1 (March 1964),
pp. 48-49.

FIG. 48 Henri Fantin-Latour
(French, 1836-1904), Portrait of Mr.
and Mrs. Edwin Edwards, 1875, oil on
canvas, 51'/* x 385/8" (130.5 x 98 cm),
The Tate Gallery, London

FIG. 49 Anne Vallayer-Coster
( French, 1744-1818), Bouquet of
Flowers, 1803, oil on canvas, 25^ x
21*4" (65.4 x 55.2 cm), Collection of
Mr. and Mrs. Stewart Resnick

148

Henri Fantin-Latour

French, 1836-1904

Roses and Lilies, 1888

Signed upper right: Fantin 88

Oil on canvas, 231/2 x 18" (59.7 x 45.9 cm)

provenance: Mrs. Edwin Edwards, Lon-
don; J.P. Heseltine, London; sale, Christie,
Manson & Woods, London, May 24, 1918, lot
59; A. Cunningham, London; sale, Chris-
tie's, London, July 4, 1933; Faure, Paris; Otto
Zieseniss, Paris; Christian Zieseniss, Paris.

exhibitions: New York World's Fair, Pavil-
ion de la France, Groupe de l'art ancien, New
York, "Five Centuries of History Mirrored in
Five Centuries of French Art," 1939, no. 357;
The Tate Gallery, London, "The Annenberg
Collection," September 2-October 8, 1969,
no. 14.

LITERATURE: Mme Fantin-Latour, ed.,
Catalogue de Voeuvre complet (184^-1^04) de
Fantin-Latour (Paris, 1911), no. 1332.

NOTES

1. Douglas Druick and Michel Hoog, Fantin-
Latour (Ottawa, 1983), p. 257

2. See Frank Gibson, The Art of Henri Fantin-
Latour: His Life and Work (London, 1924),

p. 111

3. Druick and Hoog, 1983, pp. 234, 256.

4. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5th ed., rev.
(London, 1851), vol. 1, p. xxix.

5. The account was written by Fantin-
Latour's new dealer, Gustave Tempelaere,
and is cited in Druick and Hoog, 1983,
pp. 269-70. It is unlikely that the artist's
approach would have changed significantly
between 1888 and 1889.

6. See Barbara Ramsay's discussion of Fantin-
Latour's technique in ibid., pp. 57-59.

7 Ibid., p. 269.

8. Ernest Chesneau, The English School of
Painting, 2nd ed., translated by Lucy N.

Etherington (London, 1885), p. 180.
g. Druick and Hoog, 1983, p. 256.

10. Denys Sutton, James McNeill Whistler:
Paintings, Etchings, Pastels, & Watercolours
(London, 1966), p. 53.

11. Cited in Druick and Hoog, 1983, p. 21.

FIG. 50 Henri Fantin-Latour, White
Lilies, 1877 oil on canvas, \&h x
ii3/4" (43 x 30 cm), Victoria and
Albert Museum, London

PlERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR
French, 1841-1919
Mm in the Garden, 1875-76
Signed lower right: A Renoir
Oil on canvas, 24V8 x 20"
(61.8 x 50.7 cm)

provenance: Julius Elias, Berlin; Edward
Molyneux, Paris; Ivor Churchill, London;
Paul Rosenberg and Co., New York; Sam Salz
Art Gallery, New York.

exhibitions: Los Angeles Museum, "Five
Centuries of European Painting," November
25-December 31, 1933, no. 45; The Art Gal-
lery of Toronto, "Paintings by Renoir and
Degas," October 1934, no. 1; Wildenstein and
Co., London, "Nineteenth-Century Master-
pieces," May 9-June 15, 1935, no. 2; Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam, "Honderdjaar
Fransche Kunst," July 2-September 25, 1938,
no. 204; Galeries Durand-Ruel, Paris, "Quel-
ques maitres du i8c et du igc siecle," 1938, no.
55; Wildenstein and Co., New York, "The
Great Tradition of French Painting," June-
October 1939, no. 38; National Gallery, Lon-
don, "Nineteenth-Century French Paint-
ings," December 1942- January 1943, no. 62;
Philadelphia Museum of Art, "Philadelphia
Private Collectors," summer 1963 (no cata-

FIG. 51 Pierre-Auguste Renoir
(French, 1841-1919), Young Girl on
the Beach, 1875-76, oil on canvas, 24
x ig"/i6" (61 x 50 cm), location
unknown

logue); Wildenstein and Co., New York,
"Renoir: In Commemoration of the Fiftieth
Anniversary of Renoir's Death," March 27-
May 3, 1969, no. 93; The Tate Gallery, Lon-
don, "The Annenberg Collection," Sep-
tember 2-October 8, 1969, no. 26.

literature: Ambroise Vollard, Tableaux,
pastels, et dessins de Pierre-Auguste Renoir
(Paris, 1918), vol. 2, repro. p. 113; Francois
Daulte, Auguste Renoir: Catalogue raisonne de
I'oeuvre peint, vol. 1, Figures, 1860-1890 (Lau-
sanne, 1971), no. 147; Elda Fezzi, ed., L'Opera
completa di Renoir: Nel periodo impressionista,
1869-1883, 2nd ed. (Milan, 1981), no. 192.

NOTES

1. Ambroise Vollard, La Vie et I'oeuvre de
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Paris, 1919), pp. 72, 75.
This chronology is now generally accepted,
although Riviere dated the move to the rue
Cortot to May 1876. See John House, in
Hayward Gallery, London, and Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, Renoir, January 30, 1985-
January 5, 1986, p. 298; and Georges
Riviere, Renoir et ses amis (Paris, 1921), p. 129.

2. Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, 2nd ed.,
translated by Randolph Weaver and Dorothy
Weaver (Boston and Toronto, 1962), p. 201.
Renoir's brother Edmond, writing in La Vie
Moderne, June 19, 1879, noted that the
period of gestation for the Moulin de la
Galette was six months. See Lionello Venturi,
Les Archives de I'impressionnisme, vol. 2 (Paris
and New York, 1939), p. 336.

3. Francois Daulte, Auguste Renoir: Catalogue
raisonne de I'oeuvre peint, vol. 1, Figures,
]86o-i8cjo (Lausanne, 1971), nos. 105, 271.

4. Ibid., no. 148.

5. Riviere, 1921, p. 130 (author's trans.).

6. Barbara Fhrlich White, Renoir: His Life,
Art, and Letters (New York, 1984), p. 50.

7. Nicholas Wadley, ed., Renoir: A Retrospective
(New York, 1987), pp. 86-87.

8. Vollard, 1919, p. 72, quotes Renoir as say-
ing, "Je trouvais que, dans Nini, il y avait 1111

peu de la contrefacon beige."

9. "Les personnages qu'il a peints apparais-
sent colores, dans un ensemble clair, plein de
combinaisons de tons, ils forment partie d'un
tout lumineux." Theodore Duret, Histoire des
peintres impressionnistes (Paris, 1906), p. 128.

10. Julie Manet, Journal (1893-1899): Sajeun-
esse parmi les peintres impressionnistes et les
hommes de lettres (Paris, 1979), p. 150
(January 20, 1898).

FIG. 52 Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Departure from the Conservatory,
c. 1877, oil on canvas, 735/s x 46V8"
(187 x 119 cm), The Barnes Founda-
tion, Merion, Pa.

fig. 53 Claude Monet (French, 1840-1925),
Camille Reading, 1872, oil on canvas, ig"/i6 x
255/8" (50 x fir, cm), Walters Art Gallery,
Baltimore

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR
French, 1841-1919
Eugene Murer, 1877
Signed upper right: Renoir
Oil on canvas, 189/16 x i5'/2"

(47-i x 39-3 cm)

provenance: Eugene Murer, Paris and
Auvers-sur-Oise; Paul Meunier, Beaulieu;
deposited with Durand-Ruel, Paris, 1906;
returned to Mr. Gachet, 1907; Julius Schmits,
Wuppertal, Basel; Mrs. Ira Haupt, New York.

exhibitions: Hotel du Dauphin et
d'Espagne, Rouen, "Exposition de la collec-
tion Murer," May 1896, no. 27; Kunsthalle,
Basel, "Pierre-Auguste Renoir," February 13-
March 14, 1943, no. 126; Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel, New York, "Festival of Art," October
29-November 1, 1957, no. 148; Wildenstein
and Co., New York, "Renoir," April 8-May 10,
1958, no. 12; Wildenstein and Co., New York,
"One Hundred Years of Impressionism:
A Tribute to Durand-Ruel," April 2-May 9,
1970, no. 28.

literature: Ambroise Vollard, "Le Salon
Charpentier," L'Art et Les Artistes, vol. 14,
no. 4 (January 1920), repro. p. 168;
Ambroise Vollard, "La Technique de Ren-
oir," L'Amour de I'Art, vol. 2, no. 1 (1921), repro.
p. 53; Julius Meier-Graefe, Renoir (Leipzig,
1929), p. 441, fig. 153; M. L. Cahen-Hayem,
"Renoir: Portraitiste," L'Art et Les Artistes,
vol. 35, no. 188 (June 1938), pp. 300-301,
repro. p. 302; Hans Graber, Auguste Renoir:
Nach eigenen und fremden Zeugnissen (Basel,
u)43), j). 64; John Rewald, The History of
Impressionism (New York, 1946), repro.
p. 333; Gotthard Jedlicka, Renoir (Bern,
1947), pi. 28; Paul Gachet, Deux Amis des
impressionnistes: Le Docteur Gachet et Murer
(Paris, 195b), pp. 158, 172, 175, pi. 87; Paul
Gachet , Lettres impressionnistes ... ( Paris,
1957), p. 92, repro. opp. p. 169; E. Hoffman,
"New York Review of Exhibitions," The Bur-
lington Magazine, vol. 100 (May 1958), p. 185;

L5O

John Rewald, The History of Impressionism,
4th ed. (New York, 1961), repro. p. 415;
Henri Perruchot, La Vie de Renoir ( Paris,
1964), p. 139; Lawrence Hanson, Renoir: The
Man, the Painter, and His World (New York,
1968), p. 172; Francois Daulte, Auguste Ren-
oir: Catalogue raisonne' de I'oeuvre peint, vol. 1,
Figures, i86o-i8go (Lausanne, 1971), no. 246
(repro.); Elda Fezzi, ed., L'Opera completa di
Renoir: Nel periodo impressionista, 1869-1883
(Milan, 1972), no. 290 (repro.); Marianna
Reiley Burt, "Decouverte: Le Patissier
Murer: Ln Ami des Impressionnistes," L'Oeil,
vol. 245 (December 1975), p. 59, pi. 2; Petit
Larousse de la peinture, s.v. 'Auguste Meunier,
dit Fugene"; Sophie Monneret, L'lmpression-
nisme et son e'poque, vol. 2 (Paris, 1979), p. 97;
Anne Distel, "Renoir's Collectors: The Patis-
sier, the Priest, and the Prince," in Hayward
Gallery, London, and Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, Renoir, January 30, 1985- January 5,
1986, p. 22; Nicholas Wadley, ed., Renoir: A
Retrospective (New York, 1987), repro. p. 118.

NOTES

1. The biographical literature on Min er is
considerable, although an attempt to recon-
stitute his collection has yet to be made. The
starting point for a study of Murer is Paul
Gachet, Deux Amis des impressionnistes: Le
Docteur Gachet et Murer (Paris, 1956) and the
same author's Lettres impressionnistes . . .
(Paris, 1957). An article that draws upon
Murer's unpublished diary is Marianna Reiley
Burt, "Decouverte: Le Patissier Murer: Un
Ami des Impressionnistes," L'Oeil, vol. 245
(December 1975), pp. 54-61, 92. See John
Rewald's discussion of Murer's collecting, in
his History of Impressionism, 4th ed. (New
York, 1961), pp. 413-15; and Sophie Mon-
neret, L'Impressionnisme et son e'poque, vol. 2
(Paris, 1979), pp. 96-98.

2. Chocquet's portraits are in the Henry
Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, the
Oskar Reinhart Collection, and the Fogg Art
Museum, Cambridge, Mass. See Francois
Daulte, Auguste Renoir: Catalogue raisonne' de

I'oeuvre peint, vol. 1, Figures, 1869-1890 (Lau-
sanne, 1971), nos. 71, 175, 176; and Barbara
Ehrlich White, Renoir: His Life, Art, and Let-
ters (New York, 1984), p. 79

3. Daulte, 1971, no. 247.

4. Theodore Duret, Les Peintres impression-
nistes (Paris, 1878), p. 28.

5. Gachet, 1956, pp. 147-52.

6. See ibid., p. 188, for a full listing of
Murer's publications.

7. Ibid., pp. 160-87 and passim.

8. Ibid., pp. 156-57. In 1878 Legrand
acquired a country house in Conf lans-Sainte-
Honorine, not far from Auvers, where Murer
lived from 1881.

g. Unpublished letter from Renoir to Murer
in the Bibliotheque d'Art et d'Archeologie,
Paris. The letter is undated but assigned to
early 1878 by White, 1984, pp. 51-54.

10. Gachet, 1957, p. 161; the letter is not
dated, but is probably a reply to Monet's let-
ter of April 9, 1880 (author's trans.).

11. Apart from the three portraits of Murer
and his family by Renoir, there are Pissarro's
portrait of Murer as a Bandit and a pastel of
Marie Meunier. See Ludovic Rodo Pissarro
and Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro: Son
art— son oeuvre (Paris, 1939), vol. 2,

nos. 469, 1537.

12. According to his biography in the Diction-
naire national des contemporains, vol. 2 (Paris,
1900), p. 288, which Murer may have helped
compile, these articles on the early Impres-
sionist exhibitions appeared in Leon Delbois's
Correspondance fran^aise. Renoir, in an
undated letter, wrote that he had just read
Murer's "charming article" (Gachet, 1957,

p. 97). A lengthy passage from Murer's art
criticism in La Correspondance francaise
(April 16, 1876), where he wrote under the
pseudonym Gene Mur, is published in Janine
Bailly-Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille
Pissarro, vol. 2, 1866-1890 (Paris, 1986),
pp. 383-84.

13. The works he loaned were four paintings

by Pissarro and one landscape by Monet. See
the exhibition catalogue reproduced in
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC,
and The Fine Arts Museums of San Fran-
cisco, The New Painting: Impressionism,
1874-1886, January 17- July 6, 1986,
pp. 266-71.

14. Reproduced in Gachet, 1956, pp. 166-67.
Murer acknowledged Renoir as the source
for this unwieldly project, which would have
divided the salon into four sections, each per-
mitted to exhibit one thousand paintings,
with the rejected submissions displayed in
separate rooms.

15. Duret, 1878, p. 9.

16. Monneret, 1979, p. 97, gives the para-
graph in full.

17. Bailly-Herzberg, 1980, vol. 1, 1865-1885,
nos. 61, 64, undated letter, assigned to 1878.

18. See Gachet, 1956, pp. 168-76, for the text
of Alexis's article, written in Parisian slang,
and a brief commentary on it.

jg. Monet received 200 francs for four paint-
ings in December 1877 and 400 francs for
another four paintings, which he had still not
delivered in full by April 1880. See Daniel
Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographic et cata- '
logue raisonne, vol. 1, 1840-1881 (Paris, 1974),
letter no. 111 (December 20, 1877), letter
no. 130 (April 11, 1878), letter no. 175 (April
9, 1880). Sisley reminded Murer that his
advance of 100 francs had been for two
paintings of a small format (size 8) and that
the painting Murer had selected at Legrand's
was much larger and therefore worth more.
"If you keep this painting, it will be for a
price of 100 francs" (February 15, 1878;
author's trans.). Sisley also refused to sign the
document Murer sent him in October 1878,
since it contained clauses he had not seen in
one he had signed previously (October 24,
1878). Sisley's letters are published in
Gachet, 1957, pp. 124-25. There are many
such examples.

20. In June 1879, Pissarro asked Murer to
buy five paintings from him for 100 francs

151

each, or to lend him this sum. Caillebotte
came to his aid w ith a loan of 1,000 francs.
Baillv-Herzberg, 1980, vol. 1, p. 78.

21. Gachet, 1957, p. 47, letter of January
29, 1897.

22. Georges Riviere, Renoir et ses amis (Paris,
1921), pp. 78-80. See also the equally stri-
dent refutation of the slur on Murer's charac
ter in Gachet, 1956, pp. 159-60.

23. Burt, 1975, p. 92, quoting from Murer's
diarv (author's trans.).

24. Wildenstein, 1974, vol. 1, letter no. 137
(September 6, 1878), letter no. 141
(November 28, 1878).

25. Gachet, 1956, pp. 182-83; Gachet, 1957,
p. 102.

26. See Gauguin's spirited letter of July 1884
to Pissarro, in which his exasperation at
Murer— "quel farceur que ce Murer" — is
barely concealed. Victor Merlhes, ed., Corre-
spondance de Paul Gauguin (Paris, 1984),
pp. 65-67.

27. Gachet, 1957, p. 168.

28. This comment appears in Murer's sketch
of Renoir published in Gachet, 1956, p. 192.

29. Burt, 1975, p. 61.

30. Daulte lists twelve Renoirs from the
Murer collection. These are: D84, 117, 165,
188, 193, 197, 225, 236, 246, 247, 249, 273.

31. Baillv-Herzberg, 1980, vol. 1, pp. 115-16.

32. The request was made when the two men
met at a costume ball given by Henri Cernus-
< hi. Sec Philippe Kolb and jean Adhemar,
"Gharles Ephrussi (1849-1905), ses secre-
taires: Laforgue, A. Renan, Proust, 'sa'
Gazette des Beaux-Arts," Gazette des Beaux-
Arts, 126th year, 6th period, vol. 103 (1984),
p. 30.

33. Anne Distel, "Renoir's Collectors: The
Patissier, the Priest, and the Prince," in \ lax-
ward Gallery, London, and Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, Renoir, January 30, 1985- Jan-
uary 5, 1986, pp. 22, 28, n. 40.

34. Gachet, 1956, p. 187.

FIG. 54 Pierre-Auguste Renoir
(French, 1841-1919), Jacqties-Eugene
Spuller, 1877, oil on canvas, 18V8 x
14'5/i6" (46 x 38 cm), Collection of
Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wohlstetter

fig. 55 Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Paul Meunier (The Child in Velvet),
1877-79, °>' on canvas, 1878 x 143/3
(46 x 36 cm), private collection,
Baden

FIG. 56 Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Marie Murer, 1877, oil on canvas,
265/8 x 22'/2" (67.6 x 57.1 cm),
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C., Chester Dale
Collet (1011

FIG. 57 Camille Pissarro (French,
1830-1903), Eugene Murer, 1878, oil
on canvas, 25 x 21" (64 x 53 cm),
Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield,
Mass., The James Philip Gray
Collection

fig. 58 Vincent van Gogh (Dutch,
1853-1890), Dr. Paul Gachet, 1890,
oil on canvas, 263/8 x 22" (67 x 56
cm), private collection, New York

PlERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

French, 1841-1919

Bouquet of Chrysanthemums, 1881

Signed lower right: Renoir

Oil on canvas, 26 x 2iVs" (66.2 x 55.5 cm)

provenance: Purchased from the artist by
Durand-Ruel, Paris, 1901; Henry Bernstein,
Paris, 1909; Jos Hessel, Paris; Dikran Khan
Kelekian, Paris; sale, The American Art
Association, New York, January 30-31, 1922,
lot 134; bt. in by Durand-Ruel for Kelekian;
returned to France; Myran C. Taylor, New
York; Wildenstein and Co., New York.

exhibitions: Galeries Durand-Ruel, Paris,
"Exposition Auguste Renoir," May 1892, no.
33; Galeries Durand-Ruel, Paris, "Exposi-
tion de natures mortes par Monet, Cezanne,
Renoir...," April-May 1908, no. 44; The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.'Ren-
oir: A Special Exhibition of His Paintings,"
May 18-September 12, 1937, no. 31; Marie
Harriman Gallery, New York, "Flowers: Four-
teen American, Fourteen French Artists,"
April 8-May 4, 1940, no. 24; Wildenstein and
Co., New York, March 23-April 29, 1950, no.
32; Wildenstein and Co., New York, "Magic
of Flowers in Painting," April 13-May 15,
1954, no. 62; Philadelphia Museum of Art,
'A World of Flowers: Paintings and Prints,"
May 2- June g, 1963, no. 148; Wildenstein
and Co., New York, "Renoir," March 27-May
3, 1969, no. 94; The Tate Gallery, London,
"The Annenberg Collection," September 2-
October 8, 1969, no. 27.

LITERATURE: Collection Kelekian: Tableaux de
I'e'cole francaise moderne (New York, Paris, and
Cairo, 1920), no. 58 (repro.); Francois Fosca,
Renoir (Paris, 1923), pi. 30; Peter Mitchell,
Great Flower Painters: Four Centuries of Floral
Art (New York, 1973), no. 304 (repro.); Elda
Fezzi, ed., L'Opera completa di Renoir: Nel per-
iodo impressionista, 1869-1883, 2nd ed. (Milan,
1981), no. 54 (repro.).

NOTES

1. Georges Riviere, Renoir et ses amis (Paris,
1921), p. 81 (author's trans.).

2. Julius Meier-Graefe, Auguste Renoir (Paris,
1912), pp. 132-33.

3. Until the appearance of Francois Daulte's
forthcoming catalogue raisonne of Renoir's
still lifes, this generalization cannot be read-
ily tested, but it is remarkable how many still-
life paintings bear similar dimensions—
roughly 25 x 21 inches (65 x 53 cm).

4. John House, in Hayward Gallery, London,
and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Renoir,
January 30, 1985- January 5, 1986, p. 229.

5. Renoir's handwritten list of his materials,
possibly for the use of Jacques-Emile
Blanche, now in the Durand-Ruel Archives,
Paris, is reproduced in Anthea Callen, Renoir
(London, 1978), p. 15.

6. Duveen Galleries, New York, Renoir: Cen-
tennial Loan Exhibition, 1841-1941, November
8-December 6, 1941, no. 18, pp. 40, 126.

7. See the chronology in Hayward Gallery,
1985-86, p. 300.

8. Francois Daulte, Auguste Renoir: Catalogue
raisonne de I'oeuvre peint, vol. 1, Figures,
1860-1890 (Lausanne, 1971), nos. 374, 377.

g. Ibid, no. 360.

10. Paul Hulton and Lawrence Smith, Flowers
in Art from East and West (London, ig7g), pp.
67-68, 111; see H. L. Li, The Garden Flowers of
China (New York, ig5g), pp. 37-47, where he
calls the chrysanthemum "probably the most
valuable contribution in horticulture from
China to the rest of the world." I am indebted
to Marjorie Sieger, senior lecturer, Philadel-
phia Museum of Art, for this reference.

11. H. Baillon, Dictionnaire de botanique, vol. 2
(Paris, 1886), p. 34.

12. See Barbara Ehrlich White, Renoir: His
Life, Art, and Letters (New York, ig84), p. 280.

153

FIG. 59 Henri Fantin-Latour (French,
1836-1904), Chrysanthemums, 1862, oil on
canvas, i8'/s x 22" (46 x 55.9 cm), John G.
Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art

FIG. 60 Pierre-Auguste Renoir
(French, 1841-1919), Girl with a Fan,
1881, oil on canvas, 25V16 x 2V/4" (65
x 54 cm), The Sterling and
Francine Clark Art Institute,
Williamstown, Mass.

PlERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR
French, 1841-1919
Landscape with Trees, c. 1886
Stamped lower right with initial: R.
Watercolor on paper, io'4 x i%l/4"
(26.1 x 33.6 cm)

provenance: Wildenstein and Co., New
York; Mrs. Ira Haupt, New York.

NOTES

1. Rene Gimpel, Diary of an Art Dealer, trans-
lated by John Rosenberg ( New York, 1966),
p. 20, recording a visit made on April 23,
1918.

2. University of Maryland Art Gallery, Col-
lege Park, J. B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville,
and University of Michigan Museum of Art,
Ann Arbor, From Delacroix to Cezanne: French
Watercolor Landscapes of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury, October 26, 1977-May 14, 1978, p. 112
(repro.), pp. 185-86, where it is dated to

c. 1878-80. Francois Daulte has redated this
drawing, which will appear in his forthcom-
ing catalogue of Renoir's landscapes. I am
grateful to him for providing me with this
information.

3. Francois Daulte, Auguste Renoir: Catalogue
raisonne' de I'oeuvre de peint, vol. 1, Figures,
1860-1890 (Lausanne, 1971), p. 51.

4. Two further watercolors of this series are
Passage d'effet d'automne (collection Durand-
Ruel, Paris) and Paysage d'arhres (collection
Victor Annheim, Paris).

PlERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

French, 1841-1919

Reclining Nude, 1883

Signed lower left: Renoir

Oil on canvas, 255/s x 32" (65.3 x 81.4 cm)

provenance: Arsene Alexandre, Paris;
sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, May 18-19,

1903, lot 53; George Viau, Paris; sale,
Galeries Durand-Ruel, Paris, March 4, 1907,
lot 54; Bei nheim-Jeune, Paris; Durand-
Ruel, Paris; Paul Cassirer, Berlin; Max Meir-
owsky, Berlin; private collection, Germany;
Wildenstein and Co., New York; Mrs. Ira
Haupt, New York.

exhibitions: Grand Palais, Paris, "Societe
du salon d'automne: Catalogue de peinture,
dessins, sculpture, gravure, architecture, et
arts decoratifs," October 15-November 15,

1904, no. 2; Ausstellungshaus Am Kurfiir-
stendamm, Berlin, "Katalog der xxvl Aus-
stellung der Berliner Secession," 1913, no.
223; Musee d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva, "De
Watteau a Cezanne," July 7-September 30,
1951, no. 79; Parke-Bernet Galleries, New
York, Art Treasures Exhibition," June 16-
June 30, 1955, no. 357; Wildenstein and Co.,
New York, A Loan Exhibition: Nude in
Painting," November l-December 1, 1956,
no. 33; Wildenstein and Co., New York,
"Loan Exhibition: Renoir," April 8-May 10,
1958, no. 46.

literature: Vittorio Pica, Gilmpressionisti
Francesi (Bergamo, 1908), repro. p. 91; Julius
Meier-Graefe, "Renoir," Kunst und Kiinstler,
November 1916, repro. p. 51; Paul Georges,
A Painter Looks at a) the Nude, b) Corot,"
Artnews, vol. 55, no. 7 (November 1956),
repro. p. 39; Vassilv Photiades, Renoir nus
(Lausanne, i960), repro. p. 17; Francois
Daulte, Auguste Renoir: Catalogue raisonne' de
I'oeuvre peint, vol. 1, Figures, i86o-i8cjo (Lau-
sanne, 1971), no. 435, repro. p. 49; Max-Pol
Fouchet, Les nus de Renoir (Lausanne, 1974),

>54

p. 131, repro. p. 89; Elda Fezzi, ed., L'Opera
completa di Renoir: Nel periodo impressionista,
1869-1883, 2nd ed. (Milan, 1981), no. 573
(repro.).

NOTES

1. The best discussion is still found in Julius
Meier-Graefe, Auguste Renoir (Paris, 1912),
pp. 103-16; see also Barbara Ehrlich White,
"The Bathers of 1887 and Renoir's Anti-
Impressionism," The Art Bulletin, vol. 55, no. 1
(March 1973), pp. 106-26.

2. Meier-Graefe, 1912, p. 116.

3. In a letter from Naples to Paul Durand-
Ruel, dated November 21, 1881, Renoir
wrote, "Je suis comme les enfants a l'ecole.
La page blanche doit toujours etre bien
ecrite et paf ! . . . un pate. Je suis encore aux
pates . . . et j'ai 40 ans." Quoted in Lionello
Venturi, ed., Les Archives de Vimpressionnisme,
vol. 1 (Paris and New York, 1939), p. 116
(author's trans.).

4. Petit Palais, Paris, Ingres, October 27,
1967- January 29, 1968, no. 70, pp. 102-4.
The image itself was known through several
engravings.

5. Meier-Graefe, 1912, pp. 103-4.

6. As Renoir recalled late in life to Albert
Andre, the first protagonists of open-air
painting had even reproached Corot for fin-
ishing his landscapes in the studio. Not sur-
prisingly, they "detested Ingres." Albert
Andre, Renoir (Paris^ 1919), p. 34.

7. John House, in Hay ward Gallery, London,
and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Renoir,
January 30, 1985- January 5, 1986, p. 301.

8. Quoted in Venturi, ed., 1939, vol. 1, pp.
125-26 (author's trans.).

9. Francois Daulte, Auguste Renoir: Catalogue
raisonne de I'oeuvre peint, vol. 1, Figures,
1860-1890 (Lausanne, 1971), no. 435; see
Michel Hoog and Helene Guicharnaud, Cata-
logue de la collection Jean Walter et Paul Guil-
laume (Paris, 1984), pp. 182-83.

10. Barbara Ehrlich White, Renoir: His Life,

Art, and Letters (New York, 1984), pp. 133-34.

11. Daulte, 1971, no. 623; Albert C. Barnes
and Violette de Mazia, The Art of Renoir (New
York, 1935), no. 216.

12. Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, Catalogue des
tableaux modernes . . . composant la collection de
M. Arsene Alexandre, May 18-19, 1903, pp.
43-45. In addition to the chalk drawing,
Alexandre owned two Bathers of 1882
(Daulte, 1971, nos. 398, 399). The full-scale
chalk drawing for the Philadelphia Museum
of Art's Bathers is now in the Cabinet des
Dessins, Musee du Louvre, Paris.

FIG. 61 Francois van Loo (French,
1708-1732), Female Nude, c. 1732, oil on
canvas, 273^ x 35" (70.5 x 89 cm), Hood
Museum of Art, Dartmouth College,
Hanover, N.H., Purchased through the
Mrs. Harvey Hood w'18 Fund

fig. 62 French School, nineteenth century
(formerly attributed to Thomas Couture),
Odalisque, oil on canvas, 28'^ x 36'4" (71.8 x
92 cm), The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift
of Leonard C. Hanna, Jr.

fig. 63 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
(French, 1780-1867), Grande Odalisque, 1814,
oil on canvas, 35V8 x 63"/i6" (91 x 162 cm),
Musee du Louvre, Paris

*55

FIG. 64 Pierre-Auguste Renoir
(French, 1841-1919), Nude in a
Landscape, 1883, oil on canvas, 25'/*
x 2i'4" (65 x 54 cm), Musee de
I'Orangerie, Paris, Jean Walter-Paul
Guillaume Collection

FIG. 65 Piei 1 e-Auguste Renoir, By
the Seashore, 1883, oil on canvas, 36'^
x 28'//' (92 x 72.4 cm), The Metro-
politan Museum of Art, N.Y., The
I l.O. I lavemeyer Collection

PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR
French, 1841-1919

The Daughters of Catulle Mendes, 1888
Signed and dated upper right: Renoir 88
Oil on canvas, 6334 x 51V&" (162 x 130 cm)

provenance: Catulle Mendes, Paris;
Prince de Wagram, Paris; Princesse de la
Tour dAuvergne, Paris; Knoedler and Co.,
New York; Wildenstein and Co., New York; S.
Simon, New York; private collection, Geneva;
Wildenstein and Co., New York.

exhibitions: Galeries Durand-Ruel, Paris,
"Impressionnistes," May 25-June 25, 1888,
no. 23; Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais,
Paris, "Salon de 1890, Societe des artistes
francais, exposition des Beaux-Arts," 1890,
no. 2024; Musee de I'Orangerie, Paris,
"Exposition Renoir, 1841-1919," June 1933,
no. 85; Philadelphia Museum of Art, "Manet
and Renoir," December 1933 (no catalogue);
Museum of Art, Toledo, "French Impression-
ists and Post Impressionists," 1934, no. 18;
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, "Independent
Painters of Nineteenth-Century Paris,"
March 15-April 28, 1935, no. 46; Wildenstein
and Co., New York, "Great Portraits from
Impressionism to Modernism," March 1-29,
1938, no. 38; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,
"Honderd Jaar Fransche Kunst," July 2-
September 25, 1938, no. 217; Wildenstein and
Co., New York, "The Great Tradition of
French Painting," June-October, 1939,
no. 37; Duveen Galleries, New York, "Cen-
tennial Loan Exhibition, 1841-1941, Renoir,"
November 8-I)ecember 6, 1941, no. 59; The
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 'Art in
Progress," 1944, no. 22; California Palace of
the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, "Paint-
ings by Pierre Auguste Renoir," November
1-30, 1944, no. 32; Isaac Delgado Museum,
New Orleans, 'A Loan Exhibition of Master-
pieces of French Painting through Five
Centuries, 1400-1900," October 17, 1953-
January 10, 1954, no. 77; Galerie Beaux-

Arts, Paris, "Chefs-d'oeuvre de Renoir dans
les collections francaises," June 10-27, l9bA>
no. 36; Fort Worth Art Center, "Inaugural
Exhibition," October 8-31, 1954, no. 83; Wil-
denstein and Co., New York, "Loan Exhibi-
tion: Renoir," April 8-May 10, 1958, no. 4g;
Palais de Beaulieu, Lausanne,
"Chefs-d'oeuvre des collections suisses de
Manet a Picasso," 1964, no. 351; Wildenstein
and Co., New York, "Renoir," March 27-
May 3, 1969, no. 96; The Tate Gallery, Lon-
don, "The Annenberg Collection," Sep-
tember 2-October 8, 1969, no. 28.

literature: Gustave Geffroy, La Vie artist-
ique (Paris, 1892), vol. 1, pp. 161-63; Arsene
Alexandre, introduction, in Galeries
Durand-Ruel, Paris, Exposition: A. Renoir,
May 1892, p. 30; Theodore Duret, Histoire
des peintres impressionnistes: Pissarro, Claude
Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Cezanne,
Guillaumin (Paris, 1906), p. 148; Julius Meier-
Graefe, Auguste Renoir (Munich, 1911),
pp. 146-49, 160, repro. p. 147; Julius Meier-
Graefe, "Renoir," Kunst und Kiinstler, vol. 15
(November 1916), p. 78; Ambroise Vollard,
Tableux, pastels, et dessins de Pierre-Auguste
Renoir, vol. 1 (Paris, 1918), p. 89, fig. 353; W.
Burger, 'Auguste Renoir," Kunst und Kiinstler,
vol. 19 (February 1920), p. 170; Francois
Fosca, Renoir (Paris, 1923), p. 37; Pauljamot,
"Renoir: 1841-1911," Gazette des Beaux-Arts,
65th year, 2nd period (1923), p. 342; Theo-
dore Duret, Renoir (Paris, 1924), p. 71;
Ambroise Vollard, Renoir: An Intimate Record,
translated by Harold L. Van Doren and Ran-
dolph T. Weaver (New York, 1925), p. 242;
Julius Meier-Graefe, Renoir (Leipzig, 1929),
pp. 241-46, pi. 197; R. H. Wilenski, French
Painting ( Boston, 1931), p. 264; Claude
Roger-Marx, Renoir (Paris, 1933), pp. 45, 88;
Pennsylvania Museum (Philadelphia Museum
of Art), "Manet and Renoir," The Pennsylva-
nia Museum Bulletin, vol. 29, no. 158
(October 1933), p. 20; Art News, vol. 32
(December 16, 1933), p. 10 (repro.); Albert C.

156

Barnes and Violette de Mazia, The Art of Ren-
oir (New York, 1935), pp. 103-4, 414-15, 458;
"Notable Paintings in the Art Market," Art
News, vol. 36 (-December 25, 1937), p. n;
Michel Florisoone, Renoir, translated by
George Frederic Lees (Paris, 1938), pp. 24-
25; Helen Comstock, "The Connoisseur in
America," The Connoisseur, vol. 101, no. 440
(April 1938), p. 205(repro.); R. H. Wilenski,
Modern French Painters (New York, 1940),
pp. 117-18, 341; Charles Terrasse, Cinquante
Portraits de Renoir (Paris, 1941), pi. 26; Hans
Graber, Auguste Renoir, nach eigenen und frem-
den Zeugnissen (Basel, 1943), p. 150; Michel
Drucker, Renoir ( Paris, 1944), p. 81, no. 93
(repro.); C. L. Ragghianti, Impressionnisme,
2nd ed. (Turin, 1947), p. 74; Gotthard
Jedlicka, Renoir (Bern, 1947), pi. 35; Ger-
main Bazin, L'Epoque impressionniste avec
notices biographiques et bibliographiques ( Paris,

1947) , p. 79; Felix Feneon, Oeuvres (Paris,

1948) , p. 138; A. Chamson, Renoir (Lau-
sanne, 1949), pi- 35; John Leymarie, Les Pas-
tels, dessins, et aquarelles de Renoir ( Paris,

1949) , n.p.; William Gaunt, Renoir (New
York, 1952), p. 12, pi. 60; Denis Rouart, Ren-
oir, translated by James Emmons (Geneva,
1954), p. 72; Michel Robida, Renoir enfants
(Paris, 1959), p. 60; Francois Fosca, Renoir:
His Life and Work (London, 1961), p. 154,
repro. p. 118; Colin Hayet and Francois
Guerard, Renoir ( Paris, 1963), pi. xxi; Henri
Perruchot, La Vie de Renoir (Paris, 1964),
pp. 234, 364; Barbara Ehrlich White, 'An
Analysis of Renoir's Development from 1877
to 1887," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University,
New York, 1965, pp. 181, 189; Lawrence Han-
son, Renoir: The Man, the Painter, and His
World (New York, 1968), pp. 178, 234, 237;
Francois Daulte, Auguste Renoir: Catalogue
raisonne de I'oeuvre peint, vol. 1, Figures,
1860-1890 (Lausanne, 1971), no. 545 (repro.);
Francois Daulte, Renoir (London, 1973),

p. 54, repro. p. 50; Keith Wheldon, Renoir
and His Art (London, 1975), p. 97; Bruno F.
Schneider, Renoir, translated by Desmond
Clayton and Camille Clayton (New York,

1977), repro. p. 45; Elda Fezzi, ed., L'Opera
completa di Renoir: Nel periodo impressionista,
1869-1883, 2nd ed. (Milan, 1981), no. 634
(repro.); Barbara Ehrlich White, Renoir: His
Life, Art, and Letters (New York, 1984),
pp. 178, 184, repro. p. 182; C. L. de Mon-
cade, "La Liberte, Renoir, and the Salon
dAutomne, October 15, 1904," in Nicholas
Wadley, ed., Renoir: A Retrospective (New
York, 1987), p. 236 (repro.); M. Berr de
Turique, Renoir (Paris, n.d.), pi. 60.

NOTES

1. Francois Daulte, Auguste Renoir: Catalogue
raisonne de I'oeuvre peint, vol. 1, Figures,
1860-1890 (Lausanne, 1971), p. 53.

2. Renoir, undated letter, 1888, quoted in
Barbara Ehrlich White, Renoir: His Life, Art,
and Letters (New York, 1984), p. 178.

3. Theodore Duret, Renoir (Paris, 1924),
p. 71 (author's trans.).

4. Hotel Drouot, Paris, Livres, belles reliures,
autographes, dessins, et gravures, June 1-2,
1953, p. 31, lot 410 (author's trans.). It is a
pleasure to thank Mrs. Ay-Whang Hsia, of
Wildenstein and Co., New York, who
obtained a copy of the letter for me. The let-
ter, in the original, is as follows: "Mon cher
ami/ Je suis revenu a Paris et je vous prierai
de me dire de suite si vous voulez les portraits
de vosjolis enfants. Je les exposerai chez Petit
au mois de mai. Vous voyez que c'est presse.
Voici mes conditions que vous accepterez
sans doute. 500 fr. pour les trois, grandeur
nature et ensemble./ [Sketch for portrait]
L'aine au piano donne le ton en se retour-
nant vers sa soeur qui cherche le susdit ton
sur son violon, la plus petite appuyee sur le
piano, ecoute comme on doit toujours faire a
cet age tendre. Voila:/ Je ferai les dessins chez
vous et la peinture chez moi/ P.S. les 500 fr.
payables 100 fr. par mois./ Amities et
reponse/ Renoir/ 28 rue Breda."

5. John House, in Hayward Gallery, London,
and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Renoir,
January 30, 1985- January 5, 1986,

pp. 244-45.

6. Julius Meier-Graefe, quoted in Nicholas
Wadley, ed., Renoir: A Retrospective (New
York, 1987), p. 251. "For this large, fine com-
missioned portrait, the artist was grossly
underpaid" (Francois Daulte, Renoir [Lon-
don, 1973], p. 54); see also Daulte, 1971, p. 53.

7. Roy McMullen, Degas: His Life, Times, and
Work (Boston, 1984), p. 24.

8. "Watch out. You've got to pay up. . . . If in
the meantime you have a 100 franc bill, you'll
make me very happy." Renoir, letter of
November 27, 1888, quoted in White, 1984,
p. 184. Writers from Meier-Graefe on have
puzzled over this paltry payment, which
could not be explained by Mendes's precari-
ous finances; by the mid-i88os he was a rela-
tively prosperous and well-established figure
in the Parisian beau monde.

9. Denis Rouart, ed., The Correspondence of
Berthe Morisot with Her Family and Her Friends
Manet, Puvis de Chavannes, Degas, Monet,
Renoir, and Mallarme, translated by Betty W.
Hubbard (London, 1986), p. 154.

10. John Rewald, ed. Camille Pissarro: Letters
to His Son Lucien (New York, 1943), p. 132, let-
ter dated October 1, 1888.

11. Arsene Alexandre, introduction, in
Galeries Durand-Ruel, Paris, Exposition: A.
Renoir, May 1892, p. 30; Renoir's interview
with C. L. de Moncade, published in La
Liberte, October 15, 1904, is reprinted in
Barbara Ehrlich White, ed., Impressionism in
Perspective ( Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1978),
pp. 21-22.

12. See the summary of Renoir's development
in the 1880s in Hayward Gallery, 1985-86,
pp. 241-43.

13. Renoir's letter to Durand-Ruel, in which
the portrait of Durand-Ruel's daughter is
mentioned, has been correctly redated by
John House to the autumn of 1888 (Hayward
Gallery, 1985-86, p. 254), and is published in
Lionello Venturi, ed., Les Archives de
Vimpressionnisme, vol. 1 (Paris and New York,
1939)' PP- i3!-32.

157

14. Felix Feneon's review was published in La
Cravache, June 2, 1888, and is reprinted in his
Oeuvres (Paris, 1948), p. 138.

15. Pissarro's approval of Renoir's abandoning
his former "romanticism" is expressed in his
October 1, 1888, letter to Lucien, in Rewald,
ed.. 1943, p. 132.

16. See White, 1984, p. 184, and Hayward
Gallery, 1985-86, pp. 224, 256, 260-262, for
the most recent discussions.

17. White, 1984, p. 183 (repro.).

18. Julius Meier-Graefe, Auguste Renoir
(Munich, 1911), p. 149.

19. Claude Roger-Marx, Renoir (Paris, 1937),
p. 118.

20. In Venturi, ed., 1939, pp. 131-32.

21. Why Renoir seems to have reacted so
enthusiastically to French eighteenth-centurv
painting at this time remains to be examined.
Certainly several major exhibitions of French
eighteenth-century art were mounted in the
1880s, notably L'Art du dix-huitieme siecle, at
Petit s Gallery, 1883-84; and L'Exposition de
I'art francais sous Louis XIV et sous Louis XV at
the Hotel de Chimay, which opened just as
Renoir was at work on the Mendes portrait.
He ended his important letter to Durand-
Ruel (see note 13) by styling himself "Frago-
nard en moins bien."

22. Gustave Geffroy, La Vie artistique (Paris,
1892), vol. I, pp. 162-63 (author's trans.)

23. The bibliography on these fascinating fig-
ures is extensive, although a biography of
Catulle Mendes remains to be written. On
him, see the exhaustive bibliography in Hec-
toi ralvari and [oseph Place, Bibliographie des
auteurs modernes de langue Jrancaise,
1801-1958, vol. 14 (Paris, 1959), pp. 184-207.

( )n I lolmes, see the excellent notice by Hugh
MacDonald in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New
drove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 8
(Washington, D.C., 1980), pp. 655-56.

24. See Adrien Bertrand, Catulle Mendes

( Paris, 1908), pp. 12-27 and passim; and the
entry on him in the Dictionnaire national des

contemporains, vol. 1, pp. 237-38.

25. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Gon-
court, Journal: Memoires de la vie litte'raire
(Paris, 1956), vol. 3, p. 897 (January 3, 1889),
vol. 4, p. 73 (April 12, 1891), pp. 193-94 (Feb-
ruary 12, 1892).

26. Letter to John Ingram, November 8,
1885. See Henri Mondor and Lloyd James
Austin, eds., Stephane Mallarme: Correspon-
dance, vol. 2 (Paris, 1959-85), p. 297.

27. Goncourt and Goncourt, 1956, vol. 4,
p. 612 (July 9, 1894), noting irreverently,
"Mendes has just had his father recognize the
children he had with Holmes, which legally
makes him their brother" (author's trans.);
ibid., vol. 4, p. 783 (April 30, 1895); for his
second marriage, see Talvart and Place, 1959,
vol. 14, p. 184.

28. R. P. Du Page, "Une Musicienne versail-
laise: Augusta Holmes," Revue de Versailles et
de Seine-et-Oise, 1921, pp. 10-12.

29. Henri Imbert, Nouveaux profils de musi-
ciens (Paris, 1892), pp. 138-40.

30. See Ethel Smyth, A Final Burning of the
Boats, Etc. (London, 1928), pp. 130-35, for an
amusing description of her meeting with
Holmes in 1899.

31. Jules Renard, Journal, 1887-1910 (Paris,
i960), p. 188 (December 1, 1893); tne anti-
Semitic gloss on such comment is also found
in many of the Goncourts' (1956) entries on
Mendes.

32. Goncourt and Goncourt, 1956, p. 838
(August 25, 1895).

33. Mondor and Austin, eds., 1959-85, vol. 4,
p. 197, letter of July 15, 1896.

34. Annette Vidal, Henri Barbusse: Soldat de
la paix (Paris, 1953), pp. 40-41, where
Barbusse recounts his first visit to Chatou, in
( elebration of Mendes's having received the
Legion d'honneur (author's trans.)

35. In August 1895, Renoir told Julie Manet
of the time he had mistaken Mendes's address
nl ( ite de Trevise for rue Trevise, and was
conf used all the more at finding an apart-

ment on the same floor with similar ' japon-
neries" on the window. Before the family had
time to leave the table to greet their unex-
pected visitor, Renoir realized his mistake
and bounded down the stairs, four at a time,
in escape. Julie Manet, Journal (i8g^-i8gg): Sa
jeunesse parmi les peintres impressionnistes et
les hommes de lettres (Paris, 1979), p. 62, entry
dated August 24, 1895.
36. For the modernity of the paperbound
novel, see Judy Sund, "Favoured Fictions:
Women and Books in the Art of Van Gogh,"
Art History, vol. 11, no. 2 (June 1988), p. 258.

FIG. 66 Renoir's sketch of
proposed portrait in a letter to
Catulle Mendes, 1888, location
unknown (sale. Hotel Drouot, Paris,
June 1-2, 1953, lot 410)

158

FIG. 67 Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French,
1841-1919), Children's Afternoon at Wargemont,
1884, oil on canvas, 50 x 68V&" (127 x 173 cm),
Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz,
Nationalgalerie, Berlin (West)

FIG. 68 Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Julie Manet, 1887, oil on canvas,
259/16 x 2i'4" (65 x 54 cm), private
collection, Paris

FIG. 69 Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Marie Durand-Ruel, 1888, oil on
canvas, 2834 x 235/8" (73 x 60 cm),
Durand-Ruel Collection, Paris

fig. 70 Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Young Women at the Piano, c. 1889, oil
on canvas, 22 x i8'4" (55.9 x 46 cm),
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha

FIG. 71 Jean-Honore Fragonard
(French, 1732-1806), The Music
Lesson, c. 1765-72, oil on canvas,
435/16 x 47'4" (no x 120 cm), Musee
du Louvre, Paris

fig. 72 Felix Vallotton (French,
1865-1925), Catulle Mendes, 1888,
charcoal on paper, 153^ x 9's/,6" (40
x 25 cm), private collection, Zurich

159

Claude Monet

French, 1840-1926

Camille Monet on a Garden Bench

(The Bench), 1873
Signed lower right: Claude Monet
Oil on canvas, 23V8 x 315/8"

(60.6 x 80.3 cm)

provenance: Bruno and Paul Cassirer,
Berlin; Eduard Arnhold, Berlin; Peter Gutz-
willer, Basel; Knoedler and Co., New York;
Edwin Vogel, New York; Sam Sab Galleries,
New York; Henry Ittleson, New York; Acqua-
vella Galleries, New York; Alex Reid and
Lefevre, London.

EXHIBITIONS: Paul Cassirer, Berlin, "Sie-
benten Kunstausstellung der Berliner Seces-
sion," 1903, no. 142; The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, "New York Col-
lects," July-August 1968, no. 113 (no
catalogue).

LITERATURE: Hugo von Tschudi, "Die
Sammlung Arnhold," Kunst und Kiinstler,
vol. 7 (1909), p. 100; Richard Muther, Ges-
rhirhte der Malerei, vol. 3, 18 and ig Jahrhun-
dert (Leipzig, 1909), repro. p. 230; Marie
Dormoy, "La Collection Arnhold," L'Amour de
I. 'Art, 1926, p. 244, repro. p. 243; John
Rewald, The History of Impressionism, 4th ed.
I New York, 1961), repro. p. 283; Oskar Fis-
chel and Max von Boehn, Modes and Manners
of the Nineteenth Century as Represented in the
Pictures and Engravings of the Time, rev. and
enl. ed., vol. 2, translated by M. Edwardes
(New York, 1970), repro. p. 122; Gerald
Needham, "The Paintings of Claude Monet,
xHr^-iHjH," Ph.D. diss.. New York University,
1971, pp. 245-48, fig. 73; Daniel Wilden-
stein, Claude Monet: Biographie el catalogue
raisonne, vol. 1, 1840-1881 (Lausanne and
Paris, 1974), no. 281 (repro.); Alex Reid and
Lefevre, 7926-/976 (London, 1976), p. 52,
repro. p. 53; Joel Isaacson, Observation and
Reflection: Claude Monet (Oxford, 1978),

l6o

no. 50, repro. p. 98; Robert Gordon and
Andrew Forge, Monet (New York, 1983),
pp. 44, 85-86, repro. pp. 45, 82; Paul Hayes
Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil (New Haven and
London, 1984), pp. 134-35, 139, fig. 109;
T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris
in the Art of Manet and His Followers (London,
l9'85)» P- 191, fig. 91; Horst Keller, Claude
Monet (Munich, 1985), pi. 40; John House,
Monet: Nature into Art (New Haven and Lon-
don, 1986), p. 34, fig. 43.

NOTES

1. Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biogra-
phie et catalogue raisonne', vol. 1 1840-1881
(Lausanne and Paris, 1974), p. 58; Rodolphe
Walter, "Les Maisons de Claude Monet a
Argenteuil," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 108th
year, 6th period, vol. 68 (December 1966),
PP- 333-35-

2. Monet's reminiscence as later recorded by
the journalist Francois Thiebault-Sisson;
cited in Wildenstein, 1974, vol. 1, p. 58,

n. 414.

3. Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil
(New Haven and London, 1984), pp. 125-54.
For Monet's second house in Argenteuil, see
Camille Monet in the Garden at the House in
Argenteuil (p. 54).

4. An early suggestion that the model for the
gentleman caller was Berthe Morisot's hus-
band, Eugene Manet, is intriguing but undoc-
umented; see Hugo von Tschudi, "Die Samm-
lung Arnhold," Kunst und Kiinstler, vol. 7
(1909), p. 100. Monet's own recollections, in

a letter written to Georges Durand-Ruel on
July 7, 1921, when he was over eighty, have
been overlooked by writers on The Bench; the
letter is reprinted in Lionello Venturi, ed.,
Les Archives de I'impressionnisme, vol. 1 ( Paris
and New York, 1939), p. 458, letter no. 397.
There Monet dated the painting to 1872,
which is a lapse of memory; see note 25.

5. See Wildenstein, 1974, vol. 1, nos. 62, 63,
68, 95. Also related is the enormous Women
in the Garden, 1866 (Musee d'Orsay, Paris),

for which Camille had posed; see ibid., no. 67.

6. Jean-Paul Bouillon, ed., Emile Zola: Le bon
combat, de Courbet aux impressionnistes (Paris,
1974), p. 111 (author's trans.). Zola's prescient
article first appeared in L'Eve'nement Illustre,
May 24, 1868.

7. Much of the following is based on the two
studies of Monet's activities in Argenteuil:
Tucker, 1984, pp. 125-54, especially
chapter 6, and T. J. Clark, The Painting of
Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His
Followers (London, 1985), pp. 173-97

8. From a letter to M. Aubry, the mayor of
Argenteuil and the proprietor of the Maison
Aubry, from a resident of the Porte Sainte-
Germaine neighborhood; quoted in Tucker,
1984, p. 38.

9. Ibid., chapter 5, especially pp. 128, 135-37

10. Ibid., p. 138; see also John House, Monet:
Nature into Art (New Haven and London,
1986), p. 34.

11. Joel Isaacson, Observation and Reflection:
Claude Monet (Oxford, 1978), p. 208.

12. Clark, 1985, p. 195. The proprietor, smug
or not, was in fact Mine Aubry.

13. See Isaacson, 1978, pp. 20, 205-6, and
especially p. 208, no. 50.

14. Monet to Pissarro, September 23, 1873;
quoted in Wildenstein, 1974, vol. 1, p. 429,
no. 70 (author's trans.).

15. Isaacson, 1978, p. 208, no. 50.

16. I am grateful to Anne Schirrmeister and
Dilys Blum for reviewing these issues. For a
general introduction to the topic, see Lou
Taylor, Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social
History (London, 1983), pp. 195-96, 303; and
Louis Mercier, Le Deuil: Son observation dans
tous les temps et dans tous les pays compare'e a
son observation de nos jours (London, 1877),
pp. 62-65.

17. Grand Palais, Paris, Hommage a Claude
Monet (1840-10)26), February 8-May 5, 1980,
pp. 141-43.

18. For the relationship between Impression-

ist subject matter and popular imagery, see
the well-documented article by Joel Isaacson,
"Impressionism and Journalistic Illustration,"
Arts Magazine, vol. 56, no. 10 (June 1982),
PP- 95-H5-

19. Eugene Chapus, "La Vie a Paris: Le Car-
actere de la societe parisienne actuelle; les
maisons de la campagne," Le Sport, Sep-
tember 5, i860; quoted in Tucker, 1986,

p. 125.

20. For an introduction to the topic, see Mark
Roskill, "Early Impressionism and the Fash-
ion Print," The Burlington Magazine, vol. 112
(June 1970), pp. 391-94; and Valerie Steele,
Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (New York
and Oxford, 1988), pp. 123-32.

21. "Costume en velours et damas de fantai-
sie," La Mode Illustree, no. 9 (1873), pp. 68-
69 (author's trans.). Elaborate instructions
for making up this costume, presumably for
the client who did not have easy access to the
Parisian department store, accompany the
illustration.

22. Bouillon, ed., 1979, p. 110, "les maitres de
demain, ceux qui apporteront avec eux une
originalite profonde et saisissante, seront nos
freres, accompliront en peinture le mouve-
ment qui a amene dans les lettres 1 analyse
exacte et I'etude curieuse du present."

23. For a discussion of pendants in French
eighteenth-century painting, see Colin B.
Bailey, "Conventions of the Eighteenth-
Century Cabinet de tahleaux: Blondel d'Azin-
court's La Premiere idee de la curiosite," The Art
Bulletin, vol. 69, no. 3 (September 1987),

PP- 431-43-

24. Wildenstein, 1974, vol. 1, no. 280.

25. Letter quoted in Venturi, ed., 1939, vol. 1,
p. 458, letter no. 397. The relevant section
reads: "Les personnages sont ma premiere
femme et amie, I'homme un voisin. II doit
exister deux toiles du meme genre."

26. Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, Monet
(New York, 1983), p. 85. The authors also
point to the momentary confusion we experi-

ence in reading Camille's left hand as holding
an object— perhaps a parasol— when in fact
the vertical line describes the support of the
bench.

27. See Grand Palais, 1980, p. 143-45.

28. Quoted in the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C., and The Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco, The New Painting:
Impressionism, 1824-1886, January 17- July 6,
1986, p. 44.

29. Tucker, 1984, p. 47.

30. For an account of Monet's struggles with
his family and their disapproval of Camille,
see Wildenstein, 1974, vol. 1, pp. 32, 37-38.
Camille is treated harshly throughout: Monet
abandons her during her pregnancy to
return to his family in Le Havre; their mar-
riage of June 1870 is timed to provide Monet
with exemption from military service.

31. See Paul Tucker's account of the condi-
tions surrounding the First Impressionist
Exhibition, "The First Exhibition in Con-
text," in the National Gallery of Art, 1986,
p. 104.

32. For an account of Interior, which Degas
called "my genre painting," see Theodore
Reff, Degas: The Artist's Mind (New York,
1976), pp. 200-238.

33. On this collection see Von Tschudi, 1909,
pp. 45-62, 98-109. Contrary to what has
been published in Wildenstein, The Bench was
exhibited in the seventh Berliner Secession
exhibition of 1903 (no. 142). A stamp on the
back of the painting, "Bruno und Paul Cas-
sirer, Berlin," indicates that The Bench was
sold by the Cassirer brothers before 1902, as
the brothers separated around this time. It
has not been possible to establish from whom
they acquired The Bench, since Paul Cassirer's
stock books begin in October 1903, and The
Bench was already in Arnhold's possession by
this time. I am indebted to Marianne and
Walter Feilchenfeldt for this information.

34. For a further discussion of Arnold's pic-
ture gallery, see Gordon and Forge, 1983,
PP- 36-37. 44-45-

FIG. 73 Map of Argenteuil from
the train station to the Seine, c. 1875
(from Rodolphe Walter, "Les
Maisons de Claude Monet a Argen-
teuil," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 108th
year, 6th period, vol. 68 [December
1966], p. 334)

FIG. 74 Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926),
Boulevard Saint-Denis, Argenteuil, in Winter,
1875, oil on canvas, 24 x %2'/a" (61 x 81.6 cm),
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

l6l

fig. 75 Claude Monet, A Corner of the
Garden with Dahlias, 1873, oil on canvas, 24 x
32'//' (61 x 82.5 cm), private collection,
N.Y. (courtesy Wildenstein and Co.)

FIG. 77 Honore Daumier (French, 1808-
1879), Parisians in the Countryside, 1857, litho-
graph, 8Vs x ios/.6" (21.2 x 26.2 cm), The
Armand Hammer Collection

FIG. 79 Autumn and winter
costumes from La Mode
Illustree, 1873

t IG. 76 Claude Monet, Camille in the Garden
with Jean and His Nurse, 1873, oil on canvas,
23'^» x 3'5/'6" (59 x 79 ") cm), private collec-
tion, Switzerland

FIG. 78 Honore Daumier, Countryside near
Paris, 1858, lithograph, ios/,6 x Ss/.e" (25.8 x
20.8 cm), The Armand Hammer Collection

fig. 80 Spring costume
from La Mode Illustree, 1873

L62

FIG. 81 James-Jacques- Joseph Tissot
(French, 1836-1902), Reverie, 1869, oil on
canvas, 13 x 16V2" (33 x 41.9 cm), private
collection, NY.

FIG. 82 Claude Monet, The Luncheon (Argen-
teuil), c. 1873, on on canvas, 63 x yg'/s"
(160 x 201 cm), Musee d'Orsay, Paris

FIG. 83 Photograph of the picture gallery of
the Arnhold residence in Berlin (courtesy
Robert Gordon)

FIG. 84 Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926),
Meadow with Poplars, 1875, oil on canvas,
21V16 x 25*4" (54-5 x 65.5 cm), Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, Bequest of David P.
Kimball in memory of his wife, Clara
Bertram Kimball

Claude Monet

French, 1840-1926
Poppy Field, Argenteuil, 1875
Signed lower right: Claude Monet
Oil on canvas, 2i5/i6 x 29"
(54.1 x 73.6 cm)

provenance: Gift of the artist to Maitre
Couteau; Wildenstein and Co., New York,
1967; Mrs. Ira Haupt, New York.

literature: Daniel Wildenstein, Claude
Monet, translated by A. Colloridi (Milan,
1971), repro. pp. 36-37; Luigina Rossi Borto-
latto, ed., L'Opera completa di Claude Monet,
i8~o-i88cj (Milan, 1972), no. 119 (repro.);
Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographic
et catalogue raisonne, vol. 1 (Lausanne and
Paris, 1974), no. 380 (repro.).

NOTES

1. Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biogra-
phic et catalogue raisonne', vol. 1 (Lausanne
and Paris, 1974), nos. 377-80.

2. This line of trees is seen even more clearly
in Monet's Strolling (Argenteuil) (fig. 85),
where it recedes far into the background,
with the town of Argenteuil visible beyond
the trees.

3. Stephane Mallarme, "The Impressionists
and Fdouard Manet," The Art Monthly Review
and Photographic Portfolio, a Magazine Devoted
to the Fine and Industrial Arts and Illustrated
by Photography, vol. 1, no. 9 (September 30,
1876), pp. 117-22; quoted in The Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco and the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, The New
Painting: Impressionism, 1874-1886, January
17— July 6, 1986, p. 32.

4. Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil, 2nd
ed. (New Haven and London, 1984), p. 149.

5. Ibid., pp. 149-53.

6. From the Memoire sur I'avant projet de
deviation des eaux d'egout de la ville de Paris
(Saint Germain-en-Laye, 1876); quoted in
Tucker, 1984, p. 152, p. 199, n. 26.

163

7 Unlike the grain stacks Monet would later
paint at Giverny; these temporary stacks, or
"meules temporaires,'' were dismantled once
harvesting was over and threshing had
begun. See La Grande Encyclopedic, vol. 23,
p. 822, s.v. "meule." The Annenberg Poppy
Field, although much more sketchy than the
Boston or New York versions, may in fact
have been painted last, after the stacks had
been dismantled.

FIG. 85 Claude Monet, Strolling (Argenteuil),
1875, oil on canvas, 237/16 x 31V16" (59.5 x 80
< m), private collection, N.Y. (courtesy
Wildenstein and Co.)

. • - " J . \ ■

FIG. 86 Claude Monet, Summer: Poppy Fields,
oil on canvas, 23'/» x 32" (59.7 x 81 cm),
private collection, N.Y (courtesy Wildenstein
and Co.)

Claude Monet

French, 1840-1926

Camille Monet in the Garden at the House

in Argenteuil, 1876
Signed lower right: Claude Monet
Oil on canvas, 32'/8 x 235/8" (81.7 x 60 cm)

provenance: Possibly Durand-Ruel family,
Paris; Wildenstein and Co., New York.

exhibition: The Tate Gallery, London,
"The Annenberg Collection," September 2-
October 8, 1969, no. 21.

literature: Daniel Wildenstein, Monet:
Impressions (Lausanne, 1967), repro. p. 23;
Gerald Needham, "The Paintings of Claude
Monet, 1859-1878," Ph.D. diss., New York
University, 1971, pp. 251-52; Luigina Rossi
Bortolatto, Claude Monet, 1870-1889 (Milan,
1972), no. 123 (repro.); Luigina Rossi Borto-
latto, L'Opera completa di Claude Monet,
18/0-1889 (Milan, 1972), no. 123 (repro.);
Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographic
et catalogue raisonne, vol. 1 (Lausanne and
Paris, 1974), no. 410 (repro.); Claire Joyes and
Andrew Forge, Monet at Giverny (New York.
1975) repro. p. 46; Robert Gordon and
Andrew Forge, Monet (New York, 1983),
repro. p. 200.

NOTES

1. This house still stands on 21 boulevard Karl
Marx. See the article by Rodolphe Walter,
"Les Maisons de Claude Monet a Argenteuil,"
Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 108th year, 6th period,
vol. 68 (1966), pp. 333-42.

2. Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biogra-
phic et catalogue raisonne', vol. 2 (Lausanne
and Paris, 1974). p. 233, letter no. 393 to
Alic e Hoschede, dated January 25, 1884
(aui hor's trans.). See also Monet's letter no.
442 to Durand-Ruel, March 11, 1884, in ibid.,
p. 243. Wildenstein has noted that Le
Dejeuner sur I'herbc (ibid., vol. 1, p. 144, no.

63) was left to Flament in 1878 as security
against Monet's rent arrears, and remained
rolled up in Flament's cellar for the next six
years.

3. In a letter of July 25, 1876, soliciting
money from the collector Georges de Bellio,
Monet's habitual pleading carried an edge of
sincerity when he wrote that he and his fam-
ily "will be expelled from this lovely little
house where I was able to live modestly and
work so well"; Wildenstein, 1974, vol. 1,

p. 431, letter no. 95.

4. Monet to de Bellio, June 20, 1876, in ibid.,
p. 430, letter no. 90.

5. Monet to Chocquet, February 4, 1876, in
ibid., p. 430, letter no. 86.

6. For a discussion of Monet's style at this
time, see John House, Monet: Nature into Art
(New Haven and London, 1986), p. 34 and
passim.

7. For example, the orderly Camille Monet and
a Child in the Garden (private collection, Bos-
ton), can be compared to the forestlike The
Artist's Family in the Garden (private collec-
tion, U.S.A.); Wildenstein, 1974, vol. 1, p. 278,
nos. 382 and 386, respectively. The
proposed reconstruction of Monet's garden is
based on fourteen garden paintings (ibid.,
vol. 1, p. 279, nos. 382 and 384-86; p. 290,
nos. 406-9; p. 292, nos. 410-15) and
remains open to modification, since the gar-
den has been completely altered.

8. Wildenstein, 1974, vol. 1, p. 292, no. 412.

9. See Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil,
2nd ed. (New Haven and London, 1984),

p. 149.

10. As an introduction to this topic, see Alain
Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and
the French Social Imagination (Cambridge,
Mass., 1986), pp. 189-94. ^ee a'so tne sec"
lion on the public and private garden in Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, The Art
Institute of Chicago, and Galeries Nationales
d'F.xposition du Grand Palais, Paris, A Day in
the Country: Impressionism and the French

164

Landscape, June 28, 1984-April 22, 1985,
pp. 207-41.

11. In Pierre Boitard's'jVowwaw Manuel com-
plet de I'architecte du jar dins, ou Vart de les com-
poser et de les decorer, reprinted as late as 1852,
such a garden appeared at the end of his
classification, derisively listed as "un potager
f leuriste," the sort of garden only those of
"mediocre fortune" could afford and one
that was commonly the result of "caprice and
bad taste." "We will not trouble to mention
the rules for laying out such gardens," Boi-
tard concluded, "for there are none"
(reprint, Paris, 1852), pp. 76, 116 (author's
trans.).

12. Baron A-A. Ernouf and A. Alphand, L'Art
des jardins, 3rd ed. (1868; Paris, 1886), pp. x-
xi. Arthur Mangin, in his Histoire des jardins
anciens et modernes (1867; Tours, 1887), was
even more emphatic. According to him, the
great achievement of nineteenth-century
reform in garden architecture was to "have
restored to the garden its first and essential
function— the cultivation of flowers." By defi-
nition, Mangin continued, gardens were
places planted with flowers, and he observed
with approval that in gardens of his day
"flowers were gaining ground everywhere"
(pp. 265-67 [author's trans.]). Finally, by the
end of the century, Vilmorin-Andrieux and
Company issued the fourth edition of Les
Fleurs de pleine terre, comprenant la description
et la culture des fleurs annuelles, bisannuelles,
vivaces, et bulbeuses de pleine terre, 4th ed.
(Paris, 1894), a fifteen-hundred-page com-
pendium of annuals suitable for the private
garden, with extensive discussion on how to
plant them.

13. "The system of curved lines and surfaces
has replaced that of straight lines and flat
surfaces. As a result nearly all of our gardens
now share a family resemblance that is close
to monotonous." Mangin, 1887, p. 268
(author's trans.).

14. In fact, the entry for hollyhock ("Rose Tre-
miere) in Vilmorin-Andrieux and Company's

1894 compendium might well describe the
flowers as they appear in Camille in the Gar-
den: "They are plants of high ornamentation
with an effect that is both grandiose and pic-
turesque, and in larger gardens should be
planted either in clusters or screens. Since
their stems are bare toward the base, it is rec-
ommended that they be surrounded by
clumps of smaller flowers chosen with dis-
cernment" (p. 898 [author's trans.]).

15. Quoted in House, 1986, p. 18. In his gar-
den at the Pavilion Flament, Monet is the
Parisian who constructs a nature both orna-
mental and modish. There is a certain conti-
nuity, then, between this group of paintings
and the scenes of the Tuileries gardens and
the Pare Monceau that he would paint in 1877.

FIG. 88 Claude Monet (French,
1840-1926), Gladioli, c. 1876, oil on canvas,
22 x 32'/4" (55.9 x 82.5 cm), The Detroit
Institute of Arts, City of Detroit Purchase

165

Claude Monet

French, 1840-1926
The Stroller (Suzanne Hoschede), 1887
Signed lower left: Claude Monet
Oil on canvas, 399/i6 x 2734" (100.5 x
70.5 cm)

provenance: Suzanne Butler, nee Hos-
chede; Claude Monet; bequeathed by the art-
ist to his stepdaughter and daughter-in-law,
Blanche Hoschede-Monet; bequeathed to her
nephew, Jean-Marie Toulgouat.

exhibitions: Galerie Georges Petit, Paris,
"Claude Monet, A. Rodin," 1889, no. 145;
Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, "La Femme:
1800-1930," April-June 1948, no. 63; Phila-
delphia Museum of Art, "Exhibition of Phila-
delphia Private Collectors," summer 1963 (no
catalogue); The Tate Gallery, London, "The
Annenberg Collection," September 2-
October 8, 1969, no. 22.

literature: Roger Terry Dunn, "The
Monet-Rodin Exhibition at the Galerie
Georges Petit in 1889: A Study of the Signifi-
cance of the Exhibition and Its Setting, the
Work of the Tvo Artists at Mid-Career, and
Their Artistic and Social Relationship," Ph.D.
diss.. Nor 1 hucsic 1 n 1 imriMiv Evanston, 111.
1978, pp. 80, 250; Daniel Wildenstein,
Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonne,
vol. 3 (Lausanne and Paris, 1979), no. 1133
(repro.).

NOTES

1. Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biogra-
phie et catalogue raisonne', vol. 3 (Lausanne
and Paris, 1979), nos. 1131-33. See also Claire
Joyes, Claude Monet: Life at Giverny ( New
York and Paris, 1985), pp. 29, 35.

2. Wildenstein, 1979, vol. 3, p. 223, letter no.
794 (author's trans.).

3. Wildenstein, 1979, vol. 2, nos. 1075-77,

vol. 3, nos. 1131-32, 1149-53, 1203-4, 1206-7,
1249-50.

4. The year 1887 was an unusual one for
Monet, in that he remained almost the entire
time at Giverny, not leaving to seek out new
motifs for landscape painting until he trav-
eled south to Toulon and Antibes in January
1888.

5. Octave Mirbeau, "Claude Monet," L'Art
dans les deux mondes, March 7, 1891; quoted
in Charles E Stuckey, ed., Monet: A Retrospect-
ive (New York, 1985), p. 159.

6. Wildenstein, 1979, vol. 3, p. 223, letter no.
795 (author's trans.).

7. The tentative, exploratory nature of these
paintings is also evident in the way Monet
discussed and exhibited them. "I've scraped
off and destroyed nearly everything I've done
... a superb summer ruined," he wrote to
Gustave Caillebotte in early September 1887,
at his most dejected (Wildenstein, 1979,

vol. 3, p. 298, letter no. 1424 [author's
trans.]). Gustave Geffroy had to wait several
months before seeing any of Monet's figure
paintings (John House, Monet: Nature into Art
[New Haven and London, 1986], p. 236, n.
92); and Berthe Morisot wrote to Mallarme
the following autumn of "beautiful surprises
. . . figures in a landscape" that she had missed
(Denis Rouart, ed., The Correspondence of
Berthe Morisot with Her Family and Her Friends
Manet, Puvis de Chavannes, Degas, Monet,
Renoir, and Mallarme [London, 1986], p. 161).
Furthermore, when The Stroller was shown at
Georges Petit's exhibition of works by Monet
and Rodin in June 1889 (Galerie Georges
Petit, Paris, "Claude Monet, A. Rodin," 1889,
no. 145), it appeared with three other figure
paintings under a separate rubric, "Essais de
f igures en plein air." Of the 145 works shown
by Monet in this exhibition, these were the
only 4 paintings to appear in the catalogue
undated, thus reinforcing Monet's hesitation
to present them as fully realized works.

8. The best 1 e< ent disc ussion is William 1 1.

Gerdts, "The Arch-Apostle of the Dab-and-
Spot School: John Singer Sargent as an
Impressionist," in Patricia Hills, ed.,John
Singer Sargent (New York, 1987), pp. 111-45.

9. Monet informed Rodin that he was seeing
Sargent in mid- June 1887 (Wildenstein, 1979,
vol. 3, p. 223, letter no. 791). Sargent
acquired Monet's Bennecourt, in August 1887,
presumably from Monet himself (Wilden-
stein, 1979, vol. 3, p. 88; no. 1126).

10. House, 1986, pp. 36-40.

11. House was the first to suggest that Sargent
may have played a greater role than merely
absorbing Monet's Impressionism and bring-
ing it to England. See House's discussion of
Monet's figure paintings in ibid., p. 39.
Monet's letter to Alice is quoted in Hills, 1987,
p. 111.

12. As Clement Greenberg noted in an essay
on Monet's work at this time, "[Monet] found
solutions that permitted him to keep the
weight of the picture safely on the surface
without ceasing thereby to report Nature."

" The Later Monet," in Art and Culture (Lon-
don, 1973), p. 44. For a discussion of Monet
and the symbolist context, see Mark Roskill,
Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the Impressionist Cir-
cle (Greenwich, Conn., 1970), chapters 1 and
6; and Roger Terry Dunn, "The Monet-
Rodin Exhibition at the Galerie Georges
Petit in 1889: A Study of the Significance of
the Exhibition and Its Setting, the Work of
the Two Artists at Mid-Career, and Their
Artistic and Social Relationship," Ph.D. diss..
Northwestern University, Evanston, III., 1978.

166

FIG. go Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926),
Suzanne Reading and Blanche Painting in the
Meadows of Giverny, 1887, oil on canvas, 36 x
38'/*" (91.4 x 97.8 cm), Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. George Card
De Sylva Collection

FIG. 91 John Singer Sargent (American,
1856-1925), Claude Monet Painting at the Edge
of a Wood, c. 1887, oil on canvas, 2i'4 x 25V2"
(54 x 64.8 cm), The Tate Gallery, London

'film" TAT

fig. 92 Vincent van Gogh (Dutch,
1853-1890), Girl in White, 1890, oil
on canvas, 26'/s x 177/8" (66 x 45
cm), National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C., Chester Dale
Collection

Claude Monet

French, 1840-1926
The Path through the Irises, 1914-17
Stamped lower right: Claude Monet
Oil on canvas, 78V8 x yo^/s" (200.3 x
180 cm)

provenance: Michel Monet, Sorel-Moussel.

exhibitions: Galerie Granoff, Paris,
"Monet: Nympheas," 1965; Wildenstein and
Co., New York, "Masterpieces in Bloom,"
April 5-May 5, 1973 (not in catalogue); The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
"Monet's Years at Giverny: Beyond Impres-
sionism," 1978, no. 64.

literature: K. Granoff, Claude Monet:
Quinze nympheas inedits. Poemes (Paris, 1958),
pi. xi; Denis Rouart, Jean-Dominique Rey,
and Robert Maillard, Monet nympheas ou les
miroirs du temps (Paris, 1972), n.p. (repro.);
Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, Monet
(New York, 1983), repro. p. 278; Daniel
Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et cata-
logue raisonne, vol. 4 (Lausanne and Paris,
1985), no. 1828 (repro.).

NOTES

1. Interview given to the journalist Francois
Thiebault-Sisson and published in "Les Nym-
pheas de Claude Monet," Revue de I'Art, July
1927; translated in Charles F. Stuckey, ed.,
Monet: A Retrospective (New York, 1985),

pp. 290-91 (translation slightly revised by-
author).

2. Cezanne's celebrated appreciation of
Monet's powers— "he has muscles" — is trans-
lated in Charles F. Stuckey, Monet: Water Lilies
(New York, 1988), p. 11.

3. Wynford Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting:
Its Genesis and Development (London, 1904);
quoted in Stuckey, 1985, p. 231.

4. The eminent botanist Georges Truffaut
admired the "abundant irises of all varieties

167

along the edges of the pond" at Giverny,
especially the Japanese iris (Iris kaempferi)—
the species in The Path through the Irises —
which f lourished in summer and imparted
an oriental touch" to the gardens. "The
(. irden of a Great Painter," Jardinage, vol. 87
(November 1924); translated in Stuckey
1985, p. 314. Iris kaempferi was already popu-
lar with horticulturalists by the 1890s,
praised as a plant that was hardy enough to
withstand the Parisian climate and easy to
grow: "It is said," noted one of the leading
French gardening authorities, "that in Japan
these flowers are cultivated in land that is not
only irrigated but actually submerged in
water However, in Europe, they thrive in
ground that is merely moist and gently
shaded." Vilmorin-Andrieux and Company,
Les Fleurs de pleine terre, 4th ed. (Paris, 1894),
p. 505 (author's trans.).

5. See also Wildenstein, 1985, vol. 4, p. 196,
nos. 1630, 1631, and 1633.

6. For the London painting, see Martin
I)a\ u s. National Gallery Catalogues, French
School (London, 1970), pp. 107-8; for the sec-
ond variant, see Wildenstein, 1985, vol. 4,

p. 266, no. 1830.

7. See the reproductions in The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, Monet's Years at
Givi rny: Beyond Impressionism (New York,
1978), nos. 62, 63.

8. Commenting on the seasonal variations in
Monet's garden, Mirbeau wrote: "The irises
raise their strange, curved petals, bedecked
with white, mauve, lilac, yellow, and blue,
streaked with brown stripes and purplish
dots, evoking, in their complicated under-
pays, mysterious analogies, tempting and
perverse dreams " Quoted in Robert Gor-
don and Andrew Forge, Monet (New York,
•983). P- 2°4-

9. A 1915 photograph of Monet at work on
Water Lilies (Portland Art Museum) shows the
artist perched on a high stool, protected
from the sun by a large umbrella, and with

his stepdaughter and housekeeper, Blanche
Hoschede, at hand. See Claire Joyes, Claude
Monet: Life at Giverny (New York, 1985),
repro. p. 82. Blanche's brother, Jean-Pierre
Hoschede, described how these huge can-
vases were held in place by a system of ropes
attached to pegs and large stones, "to protect
(them] from the wind." Jean-Pierre Hos-
chede, Claude Monet: Ce mal connu, vol. 1
(Geneva, i960), p. 133.

10. See Gordon and Forge, 1983, pp. 230-31.

11. See also the related Iris at the Side of the
Pool (The Art Institute of Chicago), repro-
duced in Joyes, 1985, p. 107.

12. Wildenstein, 1985, p. 331, no. 4d. See also
Henri Manuel's photographs of Monet posing
with the Morning panel: the square segment
at the end is clearly visible; ibid., p. 335,
photograph no. 3.

13. "If I have regained my sense of color in
the large canvases ... it is because I have
adapted my working methods to my eyesight
and because most of the time I have laid
down the color haphazardly, on the one hand
trusting solely to the labels on my tubes of
paint and, on the other, to force of habit, to
the way in which I have always laid out my
materials on my palette"; Monet to Thiebault-
Sisson (see note 1 above), translated in
Stuckey, 1985, p. 293.

14. See Gordon and Forge, 1983, pp. 266-67,
for an appraisal of these last paintings;
quotation on p. 266.

FIG. 93 Photograph of Monet by the Japa-
nese bridge in his garden, c. 1915, Collection
of H. Roger-Viol let, Paris

FIG. 94 Claude Monet (French,
1840-1926), Lily Pond and Path along the
Bank, 1900, oil on canvas, 35 x 39V8" (89 x
100 cm), Collection Durand-Ruel, Paris

168

FIG. 95 Clatide Monet, Irises, 1914-
17, oil on canvas, 31 x 23'4" (79 x 59
cm). National Gallery, London

FIG. 97 Claude Monet, Irises by the
Pond, 1914-17, oil on canvas, 7834 x
59" (200 x 150 cm), Virginia
Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond

FIG. 96 Claude Monet, Iris, 1914-17,
oil on canvas, 78^4 x 59" (200 x 150
cm), Beyeler Collection, Basel

Claude Monet

French, 1840-1926
Water Lilies, 1919

Signed and dated lower left: Claude

Monet 1919
Oil on canvas, 3934 x 7834 " (101.1 x

200 cm)

provenance: Sold to Bernheim-Jeune,
Paris, 1919; Bernheim-Jeune and Durand-
Ruel, Palis, 1921; Durand-Ruel sold their
share in the painting to Bernheim-Jeune,
1922; sold by Bernheim-Jeune to Henri de
Canonne, Paris, c. 1928; Garabjol, Paris; Wil-
denstein and Co., New York.

exhibitions: Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 1921,
no. 44 or 45; Durand-Ruel Galleries, New
York, "Paintings by Claude Monet," January
4-21, 1922, no. 10; Galeries Durand-Ruel,
Paris, "Tableaux par Monet," January 6-ig,
1928, no. 83; Paul Rosenberg, Paris, "Exposi-
tion d'oeuvres de Claude Monet (1840-1927):
Oeuvres de 1891 a 1919," April 2-30, 1936,
no. 30; The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, "Monet's Years at Giver ny: Beyond
Impressionism," 1978, no. 75.

literature: Francois Thiebault-Sisson,
"Exposition Claude Monet," Le Temps, Jan-
uary 7, 1928, p. 4; Arsene Alexandre, La Col-
lection Canonne: Une Histoire en action de
I'impressionnisme et de ses suites (Paris, 1930),
pp. 47-48, pi. 6; Daniel Wildenstein, Claude
Monet, translated by A. Colloridi (Milan,
1971), repro. p. 81; Denis Rouart, Jean-
Dominique Rey and Robert Maillard, Monet
Nymphe'as, ou les miroirs du temps, suivi d'un
catalogue r aisonne (Paris, 1972), n.p. (repro.);
Charles Moffett, Monet's Water Lilies (New
York, 1978), p. 7, pi. 15; Robert Gordon and
Charles F. Stuckey, "Blossoms and Blunders:
Monet and the State," Art in America, vol. 67
(January-February 1979), pp. 103, 110,
repro. pp. 102-3; Robert Gordon and

169

Andrew Forge, Monet (New York, 1983),
repro. p. 277; Charles F. Stuckey, ed., Monet:
A Retrospective (New York, 1985), pi. 112;
Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie
et catalogue raisonne', vol. 4 (Lausanne and
Paris, 1985), no. 1891 (repro.); Kunstmuseum,
Basel, Claude Monet: Nympheas— Impression,
Vision (Basel, 1986), p. 63, n. 169.

NOTES

1. Monet first confided details of this project
to the journalist Maurice Guillemot, whom
he met in August 1897. In an article pub-
lished in the Revue Illustree on March 15,
1898, Guillemot reported that Monet was
using the lily pond at Giverny "pour une
decoration, dont il a deja commence les
etudes," and that he had seen "de grands
panneaux" in the artist's studio, which would
be the elements for a circular room, "dont la
cimaise . . . serait entierement occupee par un
horizon d'eau tache de ces vegetations"; see
Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie
et catalogue raisonne, vol. 3 (Lausanne and
Paris, 1979), pp. 78-79.

2. Robert Gordon, "The Lily Pond at
Giverny: The Changing Inspiration of
Monet," The Connoisseur, vol. 184, no. 741
(November 1973), pp. 154-56. See Horst
Keller, Ein Garten wird Malerei Monets Jahre in
Giverny (Cologne, 1982), p. 145.

3. Wildenstein, 1985, pp. 79-84; for the date
of the completion of Monet's third atelier, see
his letter to Bernheim- Jeune, October 30,
1915, in which he apologized for postponing
a visit to Paris "ayant a m'installer enfin dans
tnon bel atelier. C'est fait maintenant"; ibid.,
p. 393, letter no. 2161a.

j. For .1 summary of this project, see Robert
Gordon and Charles F. Stuckey, "Blossoms
and Blunders: Monet and the State," Art in
America, vol. 67 ( January-February 1979),
pp. 102-17; and Charles F. Stuckey, "Blos-
soms and Blunders: Monet and the State,
[Part] II," ibid. (September 1979), pp. iog-25.
-, F01 example, Monet's let tci to Gustave Gef-

froy of December 1, 1914: "Je me suis remis
au travail: c'est encore le meilleur moyen de
ne pas trop penser aux tristesses actuelles,
bien que j'aie un peu honte de penser a de
petites recherches de formes et de couleurs
pendant que tant de gens souffrent et meu-
rent pour nous"; Wildenstein, 1985, vol. 4,
p. 391, letter no. 2135.

6. See Charles S. Moffett, Monet's Water Lilies
(New York, 1978), p. 7.

7. Wildenstein, 1985, vol. 4, p. 403, letter
no. 2319 (author's trans.).

8. Ibid., letter no. 2321.

9. Ibid., p. 89, without noting the source for
this information. Although Wildenstein's
documentation is extremely thorough, he has
connected this Water Lily series with a group
of canvases of slightly larger dimensions
recorded by Rene Gimpel as measuring
"about six feet wide by four feet high" {Diary
of an Art Dealer, translated by John Rosen-
berg [New York, 1966], p. 60). Gimpel saw
Monet's atelier in August 1918. This cele-
brated passage, in which Monet spoke of hav-
ing the canvases brought to him as he worked
in front of the motif so that he could "fix the
vision definitively," may in fact refer to a
group of Water Lilies measuring over 4 x 6v4
feet (Wildenstein, 1985, p. 264, no. 1823;

p. 276, nos. 1856 and 1858; p. 278, nos. i860,
1861, 1863; p. 286, nos. 1883-85) and proba-
bly painted in the summer of 1918, one year
before the series of the Annenberg Water
Lilies.

10. Monet had ordered twenty canvases of
approximately 3 x 6'/2 feet from a Mme Baril-
lon on April 30, 1918; Wildenstein, 1985,

vol. 4, pp. 399-400, letter no. 221.

11. The three other signed canvases are Wil-
denstein, 1985, vol. 4, no. 1890; sold Sotheby
Parke Bernet, New York, May 5, 1971, lot 41
(repro.); ibid., no. 1893, cut m half, the left
segment reproduced in Kunstmuseum, Basel,
Claude Monet: Nympheas— Impression, Vision
(Basel, 1986), pi. 47, p. 85; and ibid.,

no. 1894. The seven unsigned Water Lilies

are ibid., p. 288, no. 1892; p. 290, nos.
1895-99; and p. 292, no. 1900.

12. See Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge,
Monet (New York, 1983), repro. p. 277.

13. Quoted in Gimpel, 1966, p. 127.

14. See Charles F. Stuckey, 1979, pp. 114-15;
see also the same author's Monet: Water Lilies
(New York, 1988), pi. 59, pp. 106-7.

15. Roger Marx's article "Les 'Nympheas' de
M. Claude Monet," which appeared in the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 51st year, 1st period,
vol. 624 (June 1909), pp. 523-31, is cited in
Wildenstein, 1985, vol. 4, pp. 67-68
(author's trans.).

16. For examples of this modernist interpre-
tation, now much revised in the most recent
literature, see William Seitz, "Monet and
Abstract Painting," and Clement Greenberg,
"Claude Monet: The Later Monet," in
Charles F. Stuckey, ed., Monet: A Retrospective
(New York, 1985), pp. 367-82.

17. See Gimpel, 1966, p. 154, for Degas's reac-
tions; ibid., p. 60, for his own. Clemenceau
was the first and most committed advocate of
the series; see Monet's letter no. 2116 to Gef-
froy, April 30, 1914, in Wildenstein, 1985,
vol. 4, p. 390.

18. See Stuckey, 1979, part II, p. 112. Durand-
Ruel had hoped that Monet would then
release other paintings unsuited to the
government project; this did not happen.

19. A survey of the critical reaction to the
exhibitions organized by Bernheim-
Jeune in Paris in 1921 and by Durand-Ruel
in New York in January 1922 would be reveal-
ing. Reactions to the earlier exhibition of
Nympheas in 1909 suggest an enthusiastic and
comprehending reception; see, for example,
Marx, 1909, pp. 523-31; and Jean-Louis Vau-
doyer's appraisal from La Chronique des Arts,
cited in The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, Monet's Years at Giverny: Beyond
Impressionism (New York, 1978), p. 31.

20. Wildenstein, 1985, vol. 4, no. 1893.

21. Arsene Alexandre, La Collection Canonne:

170

Une Histoire en action de I'impressionnisme et de
ses suites (Paris, 1930), pp. 47-48 (author's
trans.).

FIG. g8 Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926),
Water Lilies, 1917-19, oil on canvas, 39V8 x
79" (100 x 200 cm), private collection
(courtesy Acquavella Galleries)

FIG. 99 Claude Monet, Water Lilies, c. 1921,
oil on canvas, 79 x 236" (200 x 600 cm),
The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh,
Acquired through the generosity of
Mrs. Alan M. Scaife

Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec

French, 1864-1901

The Streetwalker (Casque d'Or), c. 1890-91
Signed lower right: T. Lautrec
Oil on cardboard, 25'/4 x 21"
(64.8 x 53.3 cm)

provenance: Possibly Sere de Rivieres;
sale, Hotel Drouot, Paris, April 25, 1901,
lot 61; possibly acquired by Meier-Graefe;
Heim Collection; sale. Hotel Drouot, Paris,
April 30, 1913, lot 2; possibly Leveque Collec-
tion; sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris,
December 10, 1920, lot 119; Paul Rosenberg,
Paris; Wildenstein and Co., New York; Dr.
Elias, Sweden; private collection, Switzerland.

exhibitions: Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris,
"Exposition H. de Toulouse-Lautrec," May
14-31, 1902, no. 37; Galerie Manzi-Joyant,
Paris, "Exposition retrospective de l'oeuvre
de H. de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901),"
June 15- July 11, 1914, no. 101; The Detroit
Institute of Arts, "The Two Sides of the
Medal: French Painting from Gerome to
Gauguin," 1954, no. 127; Philadelphia
Museum of Art and The Art Institute of Chi-
cago, "Toulouse-Lautrec," October 29, 1955-
February 1956, no. 27; Philadelphia Museum
of Art, "Exhibition of Philadelphia Private
Collectors," summer 1963 (no catalogue);
The Tate Gallery, London, "The Annenberg
Collection," September 2-October 8, 1969,
no. 29.

LITERATURE: Gustave Coquiot, Lautrec ou
quinze ans de moeurs parisiennes, 1885-1900,
4th ed. (Paris, 1921), pp. 129, 214; Achille
Astre, H. de Toulouse-Lautrec (Paris, 1925),
p. 78; Maurice Joyant, Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec, 1864-1901: Peintre (Paris, 1926),
pp. 127, 273, repro. p. 38; Gotthard Jedlicka,
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Berlin, 1929),
repro. p. 174; Gerstle Mack, Toulouse-Lautrec

(New York, 1938), p. 357; Jacques Lassaigne,
Toulouse Lautrec (Paris, 1939), p. 17, repro.
p. 83; R.H. Wilenski, Modern French Painters
(New York, 1940), p. 127; Pierre Mac Orlan,
Lautrec: Peintre de la lumiere froide (Paris,
1941), p. 821, repro. p. 53; "The Gay Paree of
the Nineteenth Century Recorded by
Toulouse-Lautrec of the Famous Moulin
Rouge and of the Bois de Boulogne," Illus-
trated London News, December 1953, repro.
p. 41; Francois Gauzi, Lautrec et son temps
(Paris, 1954), p. 84, pi. 6; Hugo Perls, Warum
ist Kamilla schon? Von Kunst, Kiinstlern, und
Kunsthandel (Munich, 1962), p. 92; Philippe
Huisman and M. G. Dortu, Lautrec by Lautrec
(New York, 1964), p. 64, repro. p. 65; G. M.
Sugana, L'Opera completa di Toulouse-Lautrec
(Milan, 1969), no. 286 (repro.); M. G. Dortu,
Toulouse-Lautrec et son oeuvre (New York,
1971), vol. 2, no. 407 (repro.); Charles F.
Stuckey, Toulouse-Lautrec: Paintings (Chicago,
1979), p. 167, pi. 45; Gale Barbara Murray,
"Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: A Checklist of
Revised Dates, 1878-1891," Gazette des
Beaux-Arts, 122nd year, 6th period, vol. 95
(February 1980), pp. 88, 90; G. M. Sugana,
Tout l'oeuvre peint de Toulouse-Lautrec (Paris,
1986), no. 384 (repro.).

NOTES

1. Fritz Novotny, Toulouse-Lautrec (York,
1969), p. 24.

2. See G. M. Sugana, L'Opera completa di
Toulouse-Lautrec (Milan, 1969), no. 286.

3. Mentioned in the exhibition catalogue for
the Tate Gallery, London, The Annenberg Col-
lection, September 2-October 8, 1969, no. 29.

4. The few facts surrounding the Casque
d'Or are summarized by Naomi E. Maurer in
Charles F. Stuckey, Toulouse-Lautrec: Paintings
(Chicago, 1979), p. 167.

5. Novotny, 1969, p. 10.

6. The Tate Gallery, 1969, no. 29.

7. Maurice Joyant, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,
1864-1901: Peintre (Paris, 1926), p. 29.

171

8. Gale Barbara Murray, "Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec: A Checklist of Revised Dates,
1878-1891," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 122nd
year, 6th period, vol. 95 (February 1980),

p. 90.

9. Ibid., p. 87.

10. A photograph of Lautrec at work on this
picture in the garden of Pere Forest is illus-
trated in Stuckey, 1979, p. 4-

11. Joyant, 1926, p. 192 (author's trans.).

FIG. 100 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
(French, 1864-1901), Ball at the Moulin Rouge,
1890, oil on canvas, 45'/* x 59"
( 115.6 x 149.8 cm), Philadelphia Museum of
Ai l. I he Henrv P. Mcllhenny Collection in
memory of Frances P. Mcllhenny

FIG. 101 Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec, La Goulue Entering the
Moulin Rouge, 1891-92, oil on
board, 31*4 x 23'4" (79-4 x 59 cm),
The Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.,
Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy

Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec

French, 1864-1901

Henri-Gabriel Ibels, 1893

Signed and inscribed lower right: Pour

H.G. Ibels T-Lautrec
Gouache on paper, aovi x i5'/4" (52 x

39.4 cm)

provenance: Gift of the artist to Henri-
Gabriel Ibels; Marquis de Biron; Paul Vallo-
ton, Lausanne; Dikran Khan Kelekian, New
York; sale, Rains Gallery, New York, January
18, 1935, lot 76; Downtown Galleries, New
York; sale, Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York,
April 22, 1954, lot 25; Hon. Averell Harriman,
New York.

exhibitions: Musee des Arts Decoratifs,
Paris, "Exposition H. de Toulouse-Lautrec,"
April 9— May 17, 1931, no. 102; Philadelphia
Museum of Art, "Exhibition of Philadelphia
Private Collectors," summer 1963 (no cata-
logue); The Tate Gallery, London, "The
Annenberg Collection," September 2-
October 8, 1969, no. 30.

literature: Gustave Coquiot, H. de Tou-
louse-Lautrec (Paris, 1913), p. 188; Gustave
Coquiot, Lautrec ou quinze ans de moeurs pari-
siennes, 1885-1900, 4th ed. (Paris, 1921), p. 121;
Achille Astre, LI. de Toulouse-Lautrec (Paris.
192",), p. 81; Maurice Jovant, Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec, 1864-1901: Peintre (Paris,
1926), p. 277, repro. p. 205; Art News, vol. 37
(December 15, 1934), repro. (cover); Emile
Schaub-Koch, Psychanalyse d'un peintre
moderne: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec ( Paris,
1935), p. 211; Gerstle Mack, Toulouse-Lautrec
(New York, 1938), p. 270; Pierre Mac Orlan,
Lautrec: Peintre de la lumiere froide (Paris,
1941), p. 120; Henri Perruchot, La Vie de Tou-
louse-Lautrec (Paris. 1958), p. 253; G. M.
Sugana, L'Opera completa di Toulouse-Lautrec
(Milan, 1969), no. 326 (repro.); M. G. Dortu,
Toulouse-Lautrec et son oeuvre (New York,

172

K)7i), vol. 2, no. 463 (repro.); G. M. Sugana,
Tout Voeuvre peint de Toulouse-Lautrec (Paris,
1986), no. 434 (repro.).

NOTES

1. This apt analogy was first made by Emile
Schaub-Koch in Psychanalyse d'un peintre
moderne: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Paris,
1935). P- 211.

2. See Charles Chasse, The Nabis and Their
Period, translated by Michael Bullock (New
York, 1969).

3. For a general biography and bibliography
for Ibels see Phillip Dennis Gate and Patricia
Eckert Boyer, The Circle of Toulouse-Lautrec:
An Exhibition of the Work of the Artist and of His
CAose Associates (New Brunswick, NJ., 1986),
PP- '23-35-

4. The contrast between the two artists is
markedly apparent when they portray the
same subject, such as the popular actress
Yvette Guilbert. See Cate and Boyer, 1986,
p. 126.

5. M. G. Dortu, Toulouse-Lautrec et son oeuvre
(New York, 1971), vol. 2, p. 552, no. D3.336;
and Ee Musee des Beaux-Arts de Montreal-
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Tou-
louse-Lautrec, 1864-igoi (Montreal, 1968),
no. 10.

FIG. 102 Jean-Antoine Watteau
(French, 1684-1721), Gil les (Pierrot),
1717-19?, oil on canvas, 72V8 x 58V8"
(184.5 x 149.5 cm), Musee du
Louvre, Paris

fig. 104 Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec (French, 1864-1901), Henri-
Gabriel Ibels, 1893, Pen ar,d hik on
paper, 16'/^ x i2'/a" (42 x 31.7 cm),
Smith College Museum of Art,
Northampton, Mass., Gift of Mr.
and Mrs. Fi nest Gottlieb

FIG. 103 Henri Gabriel Ibels
( French, 1867-1936), cover for Le
Cafe-Concert, by Georges Montor-
gueil, 1893, lithograph, i6'5/i6 x
123^" (43 x 32.5 cm), Collection of
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert D. Schimmel

y ■ ^^^^^

Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec

French, 1864-1901
Woman before a Mirror, i8g7
Signed and dated upper left: Lautrec '97
Oil on board, 24'/* x i8'/a" (62 x
47 cm)

provenance: Maurice Joyant, Paris; Mine
Dortu, Paris; Wildenstein and Co., New York;
Mrs. Ira Haupt, New York.

exhibitions: Grand Palais, Paris, "Societe
du Salon d'Automne," October 15-November
15, 1904, no. 6?; GaleTie Manzi- Joyant, Paris,
"Exposition retrospective de l'oeuvre de H.
de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)," June 15-
Julv 11, 1914, no. 74; Musee des Arts Decora-
tifs, Paris, "Exposition H. de Toulouse-
Lautrec," April 9-May 17, 1931, no. 164; M.
Knoedler and Co., London, "Toulouse-
Lautrec: Paintings and Drawings," January
19-February 2, 1938, no. 28; Palais des
Beaux-Arts, Brussels, "Toulouse-Lautrec
(1864-1901)," 1947, no. 49; Wildenstein and
Co., New York, "Masterpieces from Museums
and Private Collections," November 8-
December 15, 1951, no. 60; The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, "Paintings from Pri-
vate Collections," May 31-September 5, 1955,
no. 149; The Museum of Modern Art, New
York, "Toulouse-Lautrec: Paintings, Draw-
ings, Posters, and Lithographs," March 20-
Ma) 'i. 1956, no. 26; Wildenstein and Co.,
\i u York, "Nude in Painting," November 1-
December 1, 1956, no. 37; Waldorf-Astoria
I lotel, New York, "Festival of Art," October
29-November 1, 1957, no. 173; Wildenstein
and Co., New York, "Toulouse-Lautrec," Feb-
ruary 7-March 14, 1964, no. 47; Wildenstein
and Co., New York, "Olympia's Progeny,"
October 28-November 27, 1965, no. 79; M.
Knoedler and Co., New York, "Impressionist
Treasures from Private Collections in New
York," January 12-29, 1966, no. 38.

literature: Gustave Coquiot, Lautrec 011
quinze ans de moeurs parisiennes, 1885-1900,
4th ed. (Paris, ig2i), p. 210; Maurice Joyant,
Hejui de Toulouse-Lautrec (Paris, 1926),
p. 294, repro. p. 48; Emile Schaub-Koch, Psy-
chanalyse d'un peintre moderne: Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec (Paris, 1935), p. 191; Jacques
Lassaigne, Toulouse Lautrec (Paris, 1939),
repro. p. 132; R. H. Wilenski, Modern French
Painters (New York, 1940), p. 359; Pierre
Mac Orlan, Lautrec peintre de la lumiere froide
(Paris, 1941), repro. opp. p. 113; "Paintings
from Private Collections," The Museum of
Modern Art Bulletin, vol. 22, no. 4 (summer
•955 )> P- 35' repro. p. 15; "Current and
Forthcoming Exhibitions," The Burlington
Magazine, vol. 48 (January-December 1956),
p. 212; Denys Sutton, Lautrec (New York,
1962), pp. 21, 40, pi. 37, repro. (back cover);
Jean Bouret, Toulouse-Lautrec (Paris, 1963),
repro., p. 244; Douglas Cooper, Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec (New York, 1966), p. 142,
repro. p. 143; Fritz Neugass, "Manets 'Olym-
pia' und ihre Folgen, Gemalde von vier Jahr-
zehnten bei Wildenstein, New York," Welt-
kunst, vol. 14, no. 1 (January i960), p. 8
(repro.); G. M. Sugana, L'Opera completa di
Toulouse-Lautrec (Milan, 1969), no. 471
(repro.); Fritz Novotny, Toulouse-Lautrec
(York, 1969), p. 193, pi. 91; M. G. Dortu, Tou-
louse-Lautrec et son oeuvre (New York, 1971),
vol. 2, no. 637 (repro.); Philippe Huisman
and M. G. Dortu, Toulouse-Lautrec (London,
1973), repro. p. 80; Matthias Arnold, "Das
Theater des Lebens, Zur Ikonographie bei
Toulouse-Lautrec," Weltkunst, vol. 52, no. 4
(February 1982), p. 305; Matthias Arnold,
"Toulouse-Lautrec und diealten Meister,"
Weltkunst, vol. 55, no. 16 (August 1985), pp.
2178-80; G. M. Sugana, Tout l'oeuvre peint de
Toulouse-Lautrec (Paris, 1986), no. 599
(repro.).

NOTES

1 I he ei o(i< implication < >! bundle* I I>< <1
linen in at least one Lautrec, The Brothel's

Launderer (Musee dAlbi), is discussed by
Charles F. Stuckey, Toulouse-Lautrec: Paintings
(Chicago, 1979), pp. 224-27.

2. See, for example, Douglas Cooper, Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec (New York, 1966), p. 142,
who noted: "This is one of the most curious
and remarkable paintings in the whole oeuvre
of Lautrec, for it is almost the only one in
which the unpleasantness of the subject is
underlined and tinged with bitterness."

3. See Stuckey, 1979, p. 297-98.

4. See Philippe Huisman and M. G. Dortu,
Lautrec by Lautrec (New York, 1964), p. 162.

FIG. 105 Edouard Manet (French,
1832-1883), Nana, 1877, oil on
canvas, 59'/i6 x 455/s" (150 x 116 cm),
Kunsthalle, Hamburg

174

FIG. 106 Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec (French, 1864-1901),
Woman before a Bed, i8gg, oil on
panel, 24 x igs/1" (61 x 50 cm), The
Phillips Family Collection

fig. 107 Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec, Woman Adjusting Her Night-
gown, 1901, oil on panel, 22 x
(56 x 42.2 cm), Albright-Knox Art
Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y., Gift of A.
Conger Goodyear

FIG. 108 Pierre-Auguste Renoir
(French, 1841-igig), Bather, c. i8g5,
oil on canvas, 32 x 21V2" (82 x 65 cm),
Musee de I'Orangerie, Paris, Collec-
tion Jean Walter-Paul Guillaume

FIG. 110 Rembrandt Harmensz.
van Rijn (Dutch, i6o6-i66g), A
Woman Bathing, 1655, oil on canvas,
243/8 x 18'//' (61.8 x 47 cm),
National Gallery, London

Henry P. Mcllhenny Collection in memory of
Frances P. Mcllhenny

175

Georges Seurat

French, 1859-1891

Gray Weather, Grande Jatte, c. 1888

Signed lower left: Seurat

Oil on canvas, 2734 x 34" (70.5 x 86.4 cm)

PROVENANCE: Alexandre Seon, Paris;
Walter Halvorsen, Paris; Gallery Joseph
Brummer, New York; John Quinn, New York;
Mrs. Thomas F. Conroy-Anderson (niece of
Theodore Quinn); Wildenstein and Co.,
New York.

exhibitions: Musee dArt Moderne, Brus-
sels, "Catalogue de la VT exposition des XX,"
February 1889, no. 3; Pavilion de la Ville de
Paris. "YIe Exposition, Societe des Artistes
Independants," 1890, no. 733; Pavilion de la
Yille de Paris, "VHP Exposition, Societe des
Artistes Independants, Exposition commem-
orative Seurat," 1892, no. 1091; La Libre
Esthetique. Brussels, "Exposition des
peintres impressionnistes," 1904, no. 148;
Grandes Serres de la Ville de Paris, XXe
Salon, "Exposition retrospective: Georges
Seurat, Societe des Artistes Independants,
Catalogue de la XXIe exposition," 1905, no.
41; Joseph Brummer Gallery, New York,
"Paintings and Drawings by George Seurat,"
December 4-27, 1924, no. 16; Jacques Selig-
mann and Co., New York, "Exhibition of
French Masters from Courbet to Seurat,"
March 22-April 17, 1937, no. 23.

1 1 1 hrature: Octave Maus, "Le Salon des
XX, a Bruxelles," La Cravache Parisienne,
February 16, 1889, p. 1; Jules Christophe,
"Georges Seurat," Les Hommes d'aujourd'hui,
vol. 8, no. 268 (March-April 1890), p. 3;
( .< urges Lecomte, "Societe des Artistes Inde-
pendants," L'Art Moderne, March 30, 1890,
p. 101; Johan IL Langaard, "Georges
Seurat," Kunst og Kultur, vol. 9 (1921), repro.
p. 37; Andre Lhote, Georges Seurat ( Rome,
1922), p.p. (repro.); Walter Pach, Georges
Seurat (New York, 1923), pi. 9; Walter Pad).

176

"Georges Seurat (1859-1891)," The Arts, vol. 3,
no. 3 (March 1923), repro. p. 168; Gustave
Coquiot, Seurat (Paris, 1924), p. 248, repro.
opp. p. 168; John Quinn, i8"o-ig2y. Collection
of Paintings, Water Colors, Drawings, &
Sculpture (New York, 1926), p. 15; Lucie
Cousturier, Seurat (Paris, 1926), no. 20
(repro.); Bruno E. Werner, "George Seurat,"
Die Kunst, February 1932, repro. p. 150; Dan-
iel Catton Rich, Seurat and the Evolution of
"La Grande Jatte" (Chicago, 1935), no. 23;
Robert J. Goldwater, "Some Aspects of the
Development of Seurat's Style," The Art Bulle-
tin, vol. 23, no. 1 (March 1941), p. 125, fig. 18;
John Rewald, Georges Seurat (New York,
1943), no. 85 (repro.); Jacques De Laprade,
Georges Seurat (Monaco, 1945), repro. p. 47;
John Rewald, Georges Seurat (New York.
1946), no. 85 (repro.); C. L. Ragghianti,
Impressionnisme, 2nd ed. (Turin, 1947), repro.
p. 51; Paul F. Schmidt, "Georges Seurat," Die
Kunst und das schone Heim, July 1949, repro.
p. 142; Jacques De Laprade, Seurat (Paris,
1951), repro. p. 58; Henri Dorra and John
Rewald, Seurat: L'Oeuvre peint, biographic et
catalogue critique (Paris, 1959), no. 190
(repro.); C. M. De Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre
(Paris, 1961), no. 177 (repro.); B.L. Reid, The
Man from New York: John Quinn and His
Friends (New York, 1968), p. 545; Louis
Hautecoeur, Georges Seurat (Milan, 1972),
repro. p. 47; Fiorella Minervhio, Tout I'oeuvre
peint de Seurat (Paris, 1973), ho. 178 (repro.);
Judith Zilczer, "The Noble Buyer": fohn Quinn,
Patron of the Avant-Garde (Washington, DC,
1978), p. 185; Richard Thomson, Seurat
(Oxford, 1985), p. 136.

NOTES

1. This was no. 733 in the exhibition. Seurat
had first participated with the society at its
creation in 1884, when he showed The Bath-
ing Place (Asnierrs) ( f isj. 1 1 1). The nonjuried
group included Seurat's friends Paul Signac,

( lharles Angrand, and I lenri-Edmond Cross.

2. Jules ( :hr istophe, "( reorges Seural ," Les
Hommes d'aujourd'hui, vol. 8, no. 268 ( March-

April 1890), p. 3 (author's trans.).

3. Georges Lecomte, "Societe des Artistes
Independants," L'Art Moderne, March 30,
1890, p. 101, quoted in Henri Dorra and John
Rewald, Seurat: L'Oeuvre peint, biographic, et
catalogue critique (Paris, 1959), p. 238
(author's trans.).

4. Quoted in a letter written by Charles
Angrand to Henri-Edmond Cross after the
death of Seurat; see Robert Rey, La Peinture
franraise a la fin du XIX' siecle: La Renais-
sance du sentiment classique— Degas, Renoir,
Gauguin, Cezanne, Seurat (Paris, 1921), p. 95
(author's trans.).

5. Emile Zola, Mes Haines (Paris, 1879), p. 25.

6. For a history of the evolution of the pic-
ture, see Daniel Catton Rich, Seurat and the
Evolution of "La Grande Jatte" (Chicago, 1935).

7. He visited the ports of the Normandy coast
every summer, with the exception of 1887,
when he was required to remain in Paris for
military service. See Daniel Catton Rich, ed.,
Seurat: Paintings and Drawings (Chicago,
»958). p- 19-

8. Robert J. Goldwater, "Some Aspects of the
Development of Seurat's Style," The Art Bulle-
tin, vol. 23, no. 1 (March, 1941), p. 125.

9. Quoted in Gustave Coquiot, Seurat (Paris,
1924), pp. 39-40 (author's trans.).

10. Three works bear this qualification in
their titles: Grandcamp Evening, 1885; The
Seine Estuary, Honfleur, Evening, 1886; and
The Gravelines Canal, Evening, all at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York.

11. Richard Thomson, for example (Seurat
[Oxford, 1985]), has argued persuasively that
Seurat's formulation as an artist was less
dependent upon Impressionism than is often
thought, and that while he honored their
achievement, Seurat's intent and practice
often stemmed from quite different theoreti-
cal and art-historic al sources.

12. See John Rewald, "Seurat: the Meaning of
the Dots," in Studies in Post-Impressionism
(New York, 1986), pp. 161-62.

13- See William Innes Homer, Seurat and the
Science of Painting (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).
Such studies, for all their clarification of
Seurat's methods and theoretical founda-
tions, run the fundamental danger of obscur-
ing the artistic complexity of his work. Seurat
was, finally, a painter and not a scientist.

14. See Fiorella Minervino, Tout I'oeuvre peint
de Seurat ( Paris, 1973), no. 178, for the obser-
vation that the border was added at a later
date.

15. Pissarro was describing Seurat painting a
colored frame for The Models (The Barnes
Foundation, Merion, Pa.). Quoted by John
Rewald, Post-Impressionism from Van Gogh to
Gauguin (New York, 1956), p. 112.

16. For a review of the distribution of Seurat's
pictures, both during and just after his life,
see Dorra and Rewald, 1959, pp. lxxv-lxxvi.
Pissarro also commented on the settlement
of the estate: see John Rewald, ed., Camille
Pissarro: Letters to His Son Lucien (New York,
1943), pp. 169, 181.

17. See Judith Zilczer, "The S'oble Buyer": John
Quinn, Patron of the Avant-Garde (Washing-
ton, D.C., 1978).

FIG. 111 Georges Seurat (French, 1859-1891),
The Bathing Place (Asnieres), 1884, oil on
canvas, 79 x n8'/2" (201 x 300 cm), National
Gallery, London

FIG. 112 Georges Seurat, Sunday Afternoon:
Island of the Grande fatte, 1886, oil on canvas.
81 x 1203/8" (206 x 307 cm), The Art Insti-
tute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett
Memorial Collection

FIG. 114 Georges Seurat, The Banks of the
Seine: Grande Jatte, c. 1887, oil on canvas, 255/8
x 317/8" (65 x 82 cm), Musee Royaux des
Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels

FIG. 113 Georges Seurat, Bridge at Gourbevoie,
1886-87, oil on canvas, 18 x 21'/*" (45.7 x 54.7
cm), TheCourtauld Collection, London,
The Home House Trustees

177

Paul Cezanne

French, 1839-1906
Portrait of Uncle Dominique as a Monk,
c. 1866

Oil on canvas, 23'3/i6 x 2i7/i6"
(60.5 x 54.5 cm)

provenance: Dominique Aubert; Hugo
Perls, Berlin; H. Wendland, Berlin; Paul
Cassirer, Berlin; Oscar Schmitz, Dresden;
W ildenstein and Co., New York; The Frick
Collection, New York; Wildenstein and Co.,
New York; Mrs. Ira Haupt, New York.

exhibitions: Dresden, "Internationale
Kunstausstellung Dresden," June-September

1926, no. 78; Berlin, "Franzosische Malerei
des XIX Jahrhunderts," January-February

1927, no. 6; Kunsthaus, Zurich, "Sammlung
Oscar Schmitz, Franzosische Malerei des
XIX Jahrhunderts," 1932, no. 27; Wilden-
stein and Co., Paris and New York, "The
Oscar Schmitz Collection: Masterpieces of
French Painting of the Nineteenth Century,"
1936, no. 7; Musee de Lyon, "Centenaire de
Paul Cezanne," 1939, no. 4, repro. fig. 11;
Wildenstein and Co., London, "Homage to
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)," July 1939, no. 2;
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, "Summer Loan Exhibition," 1958,

no. 20; National Gallery of Art, Washing-
ton, DC, "Masterpieces of Impressionist and
Post-Impressionist Painting," April 25-May
24, 1959, no. 26.

LITERATURE: Julius Meier-Graefe, Cezanne
und sein Kreis, ein Beitrag zur Fntwicklungs-
geschichte, 2nd ed. (Munich, 1920), p. 73, repro.
p. 85; A. Zeisho, Paul Cezanne (Tokyo, 1921),
fig. 14; Karl Scheffler, "Die Sammlung
( Kkar Schmitz in Dresden," Kunst und
Kiinstler, vol. 19 (1921), p. 188, repro. p. 185;
Georges Riviere, Le Maitre Paul Cezanne
( Paris, 1923), p. 196; Marie Dormoy, "La Col-

lection Schmitz a Dresde," L'Amour de I'art,
vol. 7 (October 1926), pp. 341-42, repro.
p. 340; O. Schurer, "Internationale Kunst-
ausstellung Dresden," Deutsche Kunst und
Dekoration, vol. 59 (February 1927), p. 271;
Emil Waldmann, Die Kunst des Realismus und
des Impressionismus im 19. Jahrhundert,
2nd ed. (Berlin, 1927), no. 493 (repro.); Emil
Waldmann, "La Collection Schmitz: L'art
francais," Documents, vol. 2, no. 6 (1930),
p. 320; Rene Huyghe, Cezanne (Paris, 1936),
pp. 29-32; Lionello Venturi, Cezanne: Son art
— son oeuvre (Paris, 1936), no. 72 (repro.);
Raymond Cogniat, Cezanne (Paris, Amster-
dam, and Leipzig, 1939), fig. 15; 'A Cezanne
for the Frick," Art News (April 20, 1940), p. 18,
repro. (cover); "The Frick Cezanne," The Art
Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 2 (spring 1940), pp. 231-
32; Magazine of Art, vol. 33, no. 5 (May 1940),
repro. (cover); "Prophetic Cezanne Acquired
by Frick," Art Digest, May 1, 1940, p. 9
(repro.); 'A Cezanne Portrait for the Frick
Collection," The Connoisseur, vol. 106 (No-
vember 1940), pp. 209-10; Regina Shoolman
and Charles E. Slatkin, The Enjoyment of Art in
America: A Survey of the Permanent Collections
of Painting, Sculpture, Ceramics, and Decorative
Arts in American and Canadian Museums
(Philadelphia and New York, 1942), fig. 560;
Edward Alden Jewell, Paul Cezanne (New
York, 1944), repro. p. 15; The Frick Collection
Handbook (New York, 1947), p. 18; Bernard
Dorival, Cezanne (Paris, 1948), pp. 25, 133;
John Rewald, Paul Cezanne: A Biography
(New York, 1948), pp. 45-46; "Frick Anni-
versary and Controversy," Art News, vol. 48,
no. 9 (January 1950), repro. p. 18; Lionello
Venturi, Impressionists and Symbolists: Manet,
Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Cezanne,
Seurat, Cauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec,
translated by Francis Steegmuller (New York
and London, 1950), pp. 120-21, 126, fig. 117;
Meyer Schapiro, Paul Cezanne (New York,

1952) , p. 32, repro. p. 33; Georg Schmidt,
Water -Colours by Paul Cezanne (New York,

1953) , p. 11; Theodore Rousseau, Jr., Paul

Cezanne (1839-1906) (New York, 1953), fig. 9;
Rudolph Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954), p. 59;
Lionello Venturi, Four Steps toward Modern
Art: Giorgione, Caravaggio, Manet, Cezanne
(New York, 1956), pp. 67, 70, fig. 25;
Ralph T. Coe, "Impressionist and Post-
Impressionist Paintings in Washington," The
Burlington Magazine, vol. 101 (June 1959),
p. 242; Fritz Novotny, Painting and Sculpture
in Europe, ij8o to 1880 (Baltimore, i960),
p. 206; Melvin Waldfogel, "The Bathers of
Paul Cezanne," Ph.D., diss., Harvard Univer-
sity, Cambridge, Mass., 1961, p. 30; Liliane
Brion-Guerry, "Esthetique du Portrait
Cezannien," Revue dEsthetique, vol. 14,
no. 1 (1961), p. 2; Yvon Taillandier, P. Cezanne
(Paris, 1961), p. 28; Hugo Perls, Warum ist
Kamilla schon? Von Kunst, Kunstlern und
Kunsthandel (Munich, 1962), n.p. (repro.);
Theodore Reff, "Cezanne, Flaubert, St.
Anthony, and the Queen of Sheba," The Art
Bulletin, vol. 44, no. 2 (June 1962), p. 114;
Kurt Badt, The Art of Cezanne, translated by
Sheila Ann Ogilvie (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1965), p. 300; Liliane Brion-
Guerry, Cezanne et Vexpression de I'espace
(Paris, 1966), p. 40; H. H. A r nason, History of
Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture
(New York, 1968), p. 44, fig. 42; Chuji Ike-
gami, Cezanne (Tokyo, 1969), fig. 5; Jack
Lindsay, Cezanne: His Life and Art (New York,
1969), p. 116; Rene Huyghe, La Releve du reel:
Impressionnisme, symbolisme ( Paris, 1974),
pp. 201, 434; A. Barskaya, Paul Cezanne
(Leningrad, 1975), p. 13 (repro.); Frank
Elgar, Cezanne (New York and Washington,
DC, 1975), p. 32, fig. 16; Sandra Orienti,
Tout I'oeuvre peint de Cezanne (Paris, 1975),
no. 63 (repro.); F. L. Graham, Three Centuries
of French Art (San Francisco, 1975), vol. 2,
p. 102; Nicholas Wadley, Cezanne and His Art
(London, New York, Sydney, and Toronto,
1975), p. h), fig. 97; Theodore Reff, "Paint-
ing and Theory in the Final Decade,' in
Cezanne: The Late Work (New York, 1977),

178

p. 21; Sidney Geist, "What Makes The Black
Clock Run?" Art International, vol. 22, no. 2
(February 1978), p. 10; Sandra Orienti,
L'Opera completa di Cezanne (Milan, 1979),
no. 63 (repro.); Jutta Hiilsewig, Das Bildnis in
der Kunst Paul Cezannes (Bochum, 1981),
p. 237; John Rewald, Cezanne: A Biography
(New York, 1986), repro. p. 44; Lawrence
Gowing, Cezanne: The Early Years, 1859-1872
(London, 1988), p. 112, repro. p. 104; Sidney
Geist, Interpreting Cezanne (Cambridge,
Mass., and London, 1988), pp. 3, 5, 64-65,
pi. 2.

NOTES

1. Antoine Guillemet to Francisco Oiler, Sep-
tember 1866; quoted in John Rewald,
Cezanne: A Biography (New York, 1986), p. 64.

2. Lawrence Gowing, Cezanne: The Early Years,
1859-1872 (London, 1988), p. 10.

3. Ibid., p. 10.

4. Antony Valabregue to Emile Zola; quoted
in Rewald, 1986, p. 82.

5. Gowing, 1988, p. 9. See Lionello Venturi,
Cezanne: Son art— son oeuvre (Paris, 1936),
nos. 72-77, 79-80, 82.

6. Valabregue to Zola; quoted in Rewald,
1986, p. 81.

7. Meyer Schapiro, Paul Cezanne (New York,
1952), P- 32-

8. See The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v.
"Lacordaire."

9. For example, in the'watercolor of Mme
Cezanne with a Hortensia (Venturi, 1936,

no. 1100) of c. 1875. See Sidney Geist, "What
Makes The Black Clock Run?" Art Interna-
tional, vol. 22, no. 2 (February 1978),
pp. 8-14, wherein the author has built a
series of complex arguments for Cezanne's
pleasure in improbable word associations as
well as visual paradoxes.

10. Gowing, 1988, p. 10.

11. "The Frick Cezanne," The Art Quarterly,
vol. 3, no. 2 (spring 1940), pp. 231-32.

12. The Frick Collection Handbook (New York,
1947), p. 18.

13. "Frick Anniversary and Controversy," Art
News, vol. 48, no. 9 (January 1950), pp. 18, 59.

14. Rewald, 1986, p. 213.

fig. 115 Paul Cezanne (French,
1839-1906), The Advocate, c. 1866,
oil on canvas, 24V8 x 20'/2" (62 x 52
cm), private collection

FIG. 116 Paul Cezanne, Man with
Folded Arms, c. 1899, oil on canvas,
36'4 x 285/8" (92.1 x 72.7 cm),
private collection, N.Y

FIG. 117 Edouard Manet (French,
1832-1883), The Bon Bock, 1873, oil
on canvas, 37^ x 32'/4" (94.6 x
83 cm), Philadelphia Museum
of Art, Mr. and Mrs. Carroll S.
Tyson Collection

*79

Paul Cezanne

French, 1839-1906
Dish of Apples, 1875-77
Signed lower right: P Cezanne
Oil on canvas, i8'/8 x 213/4"
(46.1 x 55.2 cm)

provenance: Victor Chocquet, Paris;
Mine Veuve Choquet sale, Galerie Georges
Petit, Paris, July 1, 3-4, 1899, no. 3; Galeries
Durand-Ruel, Paris; Pierre Durand-Ruel,
Paris, 1913; deposited with Durand-Ruel
Galleries, New York, 1936.

exhibitions: Possibly Paris, "Troisieme
Exposition des Impressionnistes," 1877;
Grand Palais, Paris, "Societe du Salon
dAutomne," October 15-November 15, 1904,
no. 21; Galeries Durand-Ruel, Paris, "Expo-
sition de natures mortes par Monet,
Cezanne, Renoir...," April-May 1908, no. 14;
Chambre Syndicale de la Curiosite et des
Beaux-Arts, Paris, "Exposition d'oeuvres
dart des XVIIIe, XIXe, et XXe siecles," April
25-May 15, 1923, no. 164; Galerie Bernheim-
Jeune, Paris, "Exposition retrospective Paul
Cezanne (1839-1906)," June 1-30, 1926,
no. 11; Galerien Thannhauser, Berlin, "Erste
Sonderausstellung in Berlin," January 9-mid-
February 1927, no. 16; Galeries Durand-Ruel,
Paris, "Quelques oeuvres importantes de
Manet a Van Gogh," February-March 1932,
no. 4; Durand-Ruel Galleries, New York,
"Cezanne, Intimate Exhibition," 1938, no. 3;
Durand-Ruel Galleries, New York, "The
Four Great Impressionists: Cezanne, Degas,
Renoir, Manet," March 27-April 13, 1940,
no. 4; Paul Rosenberg and Co., New York,
"Loan Exhibition ol Paintings by Cezanne
(1839-1906)," November 19-December 19,
1942, no. 2; Durand-Ruel Galleries, New
York, "Still Fife, Manet to Picasso," March
8-31, 1944, no. 4; Kunsthaus, Zurich, "Paul
Cezanne, 1839-1906," August 22-October 7,
1956, no. 19; The Tate Gallery, London,

"The Annenberg Collection," September 2-
October 8, 1969, no. 5.

literature: Jean Royere, "Paul Cezanne:
Erinnerungen," Kunst und Kiinstler, vol. 10
(1912), repro. p. 486; Ambroise Vollard, Paul
Cezanne (Paris, 1914), fig. 45; A. Zeisho, Paul
Cezanne (Tokyo, 1921), fig. 8?; Georges
Riviere, Le Maitre Paul Cezanne (Paris, 1923),
p. 211; Paul Bernard, Sur Paul Cezanne (Paris,
1925), repro. opp. p. 69; E. Teriade, "Jeun-
esse," Cahiers d'Art, 6th year (1931), repro.
p. 15; Lionello Venturi, Cezanne: Son art—son
oeuvre (Paris, 1936), no. 207 (repro.); G.
Besson, Cezanne (Paris, 1936), fig. 25; Elie
Faure, Cezanne (Paris, 1936), fig. 25; Alfred
M. Frankfurter, "Cezanne: Intimate Exhibi-
tion: Forty-One Paintings Shown for the
Benefit of Hope Farm," Art News, March 26,
1938, repro. p. 11; Fritz Novotny, Cezanne und
das Ende der wissenschaftlichen Perspektive
(Vienna, 1938), p. 78, no. 70; R. H. Wilenski,
Modern French Painters (New York, 1940),
p. 371; Robert William Ratcliffe, "Cezanne's
Working Methods and Their Theoretical
Background," Ph.D. diss., University of Lon-
don, i960, pp. 50-52; Yvon Taillandier,
P. Cezanne (Paris, 1961), p. 56, repro. p. 20;
Kurt Badt, The Art of Cezanne, translated by
Sheila Ann Ogilvie (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1965), p. 331; John Rewald, "Choc-
quet and Cezanne," Gazette des Beaux-Arts,
111th year, 6th period, vol. 74 (July-August
1969), p. 84, no. 31, repro. p. 55, fig. 15; Wallv
Findlay Galleries, New York, Les Environs
d'Aix-en-Provence (New York, 1974); Sandra
Orient i, Tout I'oeuvre peint de Cezanne (Paris,
1975), no. 206 (repro.); Meyer Schapiro, Paul
Cezanne (Paris, 1975), fig. 15; Theodore Reff,
"The Pictures within Cezanne's Pictures,"
Arts Magazine, vol. 53, no. 10 ( June 1979),
p. 95, fig. 16; John Rewald, Cezanne: A Biog-
raphy (New York, 1986), fig. 118; Sidney
( .cist , Interpreting Cezanne (Cambridge,
Mass., and London, 1988), pp. 96—97, pi. 77;
John Rewald, Cezanne and America: Dealers,

Collectors, Artist, and Critics, i8c)i-ig2i
(Princeton, NJ., and London, 1989), pp. 122,
128 n. 36, pp. 134, 152 n. 23.

NOTES

1. Maurice Denis, Theories, 18 80-igio (Paris,
1912), p. 242; quoted in John Rewald, The
History of Impressionism, rev. ed. (New York,
1961), p. 412.

2. Quoted in John Rewald, Cezanne: A Biogra-
phy (New York, 1986), p. 113.

3. Robert William Ratcliffe, "Cezanne's Work-
ing Methods and Their Theoretical Back-
ground," Ph.D. diss., University of London,
i960, pp. 50-52.

4. Theodore Reff, "The Pictures within
Cezanne's Pictures," Arts Magazine, vol. 53,
no. 10 (June 1979), pp. 95-97.

5. Exhibited at Wally Findlay Galleries, New
York, "Les Environs d'Aix-en-Provence,"
October 24-November 26, 1974.

6. The painting is signed in red at the lower
right. This is a rare occurrence for Cezanne,
who signed very few of his pictures, and is an
aid in dating the painting, since many of the
works ow ned by his early patron, Victor
Chocquet, are signed in this manner.
Chocquet was one of the first articulate
spokesmen for the Impressionists, whose
work he collected with thoughtfulness and
method. At the time of the sale following the
death of Chocquet's widow in 1899, his collec-
tion included this picture, among 36 or 37
Cezannes, as well as numerous works by
Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir. However, there
is no evidence as to when this picture entered
Chocquet's collection. See Mme Veuve Choc-
quet sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, July

1, 3-4, 1899. For information on the Choc-
quet collection, see John Rewald, "Chocquet
and Cezanne," Gazette des Beaux Arts, 111th
year, 6th period, vol. 74 (July-August 1969),
PP- 33-96-

180

fig. 118 Paul Cezanne (French, 1839-1906),
detail of one panel from six-paneled
folding screen, which was once
attached to the reverse of Arcadian
Scene, Musee Granet, Aix-en-Provence

Paul Cezanne

French, 1839-1906
The Bathers, c. 1888
Watercolor and pencil on paper,

4V8 x 77/3" (12.6 x 20 cm)
Reverse: Landscape

provenance: Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Cagnes;Jean Renoir, Paris and Marlotte;
Wildenstein and Co., New York.

exhibitions: Galerie Flechtheim, Berlin,
'Aquarelle: Cezanne," May 1927; Wildenstein
and Co., London, "Homage to Paul Cezanne
(1839-1906)," July 1939, no. 54; Philadelphia
Museum of Art, "Exhibition of Philadelphia
Private Collectors," summer 1963 (no cata-
logue); The Tate Gallery, London, "The
Annenberg Collection," September 2-
October 8, 1969, no. 6.

literature: Ambroise Vollard, La Vie et
I'oeuvre de Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Paris, 1919),
p. 114; Georges Riviere, Le Maitre Paul
Cezanne (Paris, 1923), p. 217; "Berliner Aus-
tellungen," Der Cicerone, vol. 19, no. 9 (1927),
repro. p. 288; Ambroise Vollard, En e'cou-
tant Cezanne, Degas, Renoir (Paris, 1938),
pp. 206-7; Lionello Venturi, Cezanne: Son art-
son oeuvre (Paris, 1936), no. 902 (repro.);
Alfred Neumeyer, Cezanne Drawings (New
York and London, 1958), no. 20 (repro.);
Alfred Neumeyer, Paul Cezanne: Die Baden-
den (Stuttgart, 1959), p. 8, pi. 4; Melvin
Waldfogel, "The Bathers of Paul Cezanne,"
Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, Cambridge,
Mass., 1961, pp. 112, 159, pi. 64; Barbara Ehr-
lich White, "The Bathers of 1887 and Ren-
oir's Anti-Impressionism," The Art Bulletin,
vol. 55, no. 1 (March 1973), p. 119, n. 47; John
Rewald, Paul Cezanne: The Watercolors, A Cat-
alogue Raisonne (Boston, 1983), no. 132
(repro.).

notes

1. The other oil is Bathers, oil on canvas,
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow;
see Lionello Venturi, Cezanne: Son art— son
oeuvre (Paris, 1936), nos. 580, 581, 588.
Venturi, Cezanne: Son art— son oeuvre (Paris,
1936), no. 580, 581, 588.

2. Maurice Denis, Theories, 1880-icjio (Paris,
1912), p. 242; quoted in John Rewald, The
History of Impressionism, rev. ed. (New York,
1961), p. 412.

3. Ambroise Vollard, La Vie et I'oeuvre de
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Paris, 1919), p. 114.

4. John Rewald, Paul Cezanne: The Water-
colors, A Catalogue Raisonne { Boston, 1983),
pp. 157-58, no. 298.

5. Vollard, 1919, p. 114, places it as 1882; see
Venturi, 1936, no. 902.

FIG. 119 Paul Cezanne (French, 1839-1906),
Bathers, 1885-90, pencil and watercolor on
leaf from a sketchbook, 5 x S'/s" (12.7 x 20.6
cm), The Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., Lillie
P. Bliss Collection

l8l

FTG. 120 Paul Cezanne, Bathers, c. 1894, oil
on canvas, 235/8 x ^v/s" (60 x 80 cm), Musee
d'Orsay, Paris

FIG. 121 Paul Cezanne, Bathers, oil on canvas,
2034 x 25'4 (52 x 63 cm), The Saint Louis Art
Museum, Gift of Mrs. Mark C. Steinberg

Paul Cezanne

French, 1839-1906

The House with the Cracked Walls, 1892-94
Oil on canvas, 3P/2 x 2334"
(80 x 60.4 cm)

provenance: Ambroise Vollard, Paris;
Paul Cassirer, Berlin; Adolph Rothermundt,
Dresden; Paul Cassirer, Berlin; Hugo Perls,
Berlin, and Georg Caspari, Munich; Prince
Matsukata, Paris; private collection, Ger-
many; Mrs. Ira Haupt, New York.

exhibitions: Galerie Vollard, Paris, "Paul
Cezanne," 1899, no. 3; Wildenstein and Co.,
New York, "Masterpieces from Museums and
Private Collections," November 8-December
15, 1951, no. 51; The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, "Paintings from Private Collec-
tions," May 31-September 5, 1955, no. 22;
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, "Summer Loan Exhibition," summer
1958, no. 21; National Gallery of Art, Wash-
ington, D.C., "Masterpieces of Impressionist
and Post-Impressionist Painting," April 25-
May 24, 1959, no. 28; The Phillips Collec-
tion, Washington, D.C., The Art Institute of
Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Bos-
ton, "Cezanne, An Exhibition in Honor of
the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Phillips Col-
lection," February 27-March 28, 1971, no. 22.

literature: "Confiscation de tableaux,"
Le Bulletin de la vie artistique, vol. 1, no. 26
(December 15, 1920), repro. p. 750; Julius
Meier-Graefe, Cezanne und sein Kreis, 2nd ed.
(Munich, 1920), p. 129 (repro.); Georges
Riviere, Le Maitre Paul Cezanne (Paris, 1923),
p. 204; Julius Meier-Graefe, Cezanne, trans-
lated by J. Holroyd-Reece (London and New
York, 1927), pi. 36; Kurt Pfister, Cezanne,
Gestalt, Werk, Mythos (Potsdam, 1927), pi. 44;
Lionel lo Venturi, Cezanne: Son art— son oeuvre
( Paris, 1936), no. 657 (repro.); Georges
Riviere, Cezanne: Le Peintre solitaire (Paris,
1936), p. 119, repro. p. 70; E. Schenck, "Girl

with the Doll," Honolulu Academy of Arts Bul-
letin, March 1937, fig. 5; Raymond Cogniat,
Cezanne (Paris, Amsterdam, and Leipzig,
1939), no. 95 (repro.); Bernard Dorival,
Cezanne (Paris, 1948), p. 80, no. 140 (repro.);
Gotthard Jedlicka, Cezanne (Bern, 1948),
no. 42 (repro.); "Fifty Years for Wilden-
stein," Art News, vol. 50, no. 7 (November
1951), repro. p. 27; Meyer Schapiro, Paul
Cezanne (New York, 1952), pp. 106-7 (repro.);
Theodore Rousseau, Paul Cezanne (1839—
1906) (New York, 1953), pi. 23; John Rewald,
Cezanne: Paysages (Paris, 1958), pi. 10; Ralph
T. Coe, "Impressionist and Post-Impressionist
Paintings in Washington," The Burlington
Magazine, vol. 101 (June 1959), p. 242; Hugo
Perls, Warum is Kamilla schonf, Von Kunst,
Kunstlern und Kunsthandel (Munich, 1962),
n.p. (repro.); Liliane Brion-Guerry, Cezanne et
^expression de Vespace (Paris, 1966), p. 120;
Jack Lindsay, Cezanne: His Life and Art (New
York, 1969), repro. p. 168; Yasushi Inoue and
Shuji Takashina, Cezanne (Tokyo, 1972),
no. 47 (repro.); Marcel Brion, Paul Cezanne
(Milan, 1972), repro. p. 79; Yusuke Naka-
hara, Cezanne (Tokyo, 1974), no. 21 (repro.);
Sandra Orienti, Tout I'oeuvre peint de Cezanne
(Paris, 1975), no. 686 (repro.); Frank Elgar,
Cezanne (New York, 1975), p. 189, pi. 111;
Theodore Ref f, "Painting and Theory in the
Final Decade," in The Museum of Modern
Art, New York, Cezanne: The Late Work (New
York, 1977), p. 24 (repro.); Matthias Arnold,
"Cezanne und van Gogh — Die beiden gros-
sen Post-impressionisten: Ein Vergleich II,"
Weltkunst, vol. 56, no. 2 (January 15, 1986),
repro. p. 133.

notes

1. Nearly all those who have written about this
justly famous picture have felt the need to set
it aside from much else Cezanne produced in
the final phase of his career, noting the
essentially subjective and evocative nature of
the image as opposed to the more analytical
and objective quality of his late landscapes.
Io Ralph T. Coe it presents a complete para-

182

dox within the overall work: "a feeling of
loneliness . . . showing a romantic aspect of
Cezanne's sensibility, notwithstanding his pri-
mary search for structural forms" ("Impres-
sionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings in
Washington," The Burlington Magazine,
vol. 101 [June 1959], p. 242). For Theodore
Reff, it hints at the reemergence of earlier
romantic obsessions in the old Cezanne,
"after being banished from his more objec-
tive and impersonal art in the intervening
years" ("Painting and Theory in the Final
Decade," in The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, Cezanne: The Late Work [New York,
1977], pp. 24-25). Liliane Brion-Guerry
places it in the critical moment in Cezanne's
career when, having brought his art to a
point of complete equilibrium and solidity
through a balance of observation and
abstraction, just through the intensity and
hardness ("durci") required to bring painting
to such a fruitful and prophetic point, this
"very solidity [durcissement meme'] creates a
tension that provokes an impression of
malaise." This is prophetic: "the entire uni-
verse seems on the verge of a cataclysm that
will destroy it." The picture becomes a pre-
monition of the "precariousness of this world
of abstraction, a precursor of its destruction"
(Cezanne et I 'expression de Vespace [Paris,
1966], p. 120) (author's trans.).

2. Meyer Schapiro, Paul Cezanne (New York,
1952), p. 106; the Saint Anthony reference is
to the fraught scenes"of Anthony's tempta-
tions that Cezanne did in the late 1860s and
early 1870s.

3. Reff, 1977, pp. 24-25.

4. Lionello Venturi, Cezanne: Son art— son
oeuvre (Paris, 1936), no. 133. Number 35 bou-
levard des Capucines, Paris "Exposition de la
societe anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculp-
teurs, et gravures," April 15-May 15, 1874,
no. 42; Palais du Champ de Mars, Paris,
"Exposition centennale de l'art francais,
Exposition Universelle," 1899-1900, no. 124.

5. There is also a painting of the late 1870s

called the Abandoned House (private collec-
tion, Boston) to which parallels have been
drawn (Reff, 1977, p. 25). However, we do
know, in that case, that the title seems not to
have been Cezanne's, and, in point of fact,
the structure could just as easily be closed up
as abandoned and bears little of the sinister
nature of the Annenberg picture, which has
borne the descriptive title "Maison Lezar-
dee" since first shown by Vollard in 1899,
although it is listed in his account books as
"Maison du Pendu."

6. John Rewald, Cezanne: A Biography (New
York, 1986), pp. 193, 240-44.

FIG. 122 Paul Cezanne (French, 1839-1906),
Maison Maria with a View of Chateau Noir, oil
on canvas, 255/8 x 31V8" (65 x 81 cm), Kimbell
Art Museum, Fort Worth

FIG. 123 Paul Cezanne, House of the Hanged
Man, Auvers-sur-Oise, c. 1873, oil on canvas,
2i5/s x 26" (55 x 66 cm), Musee d'Orsay, Paris

FIG. 124 Paul Cezanne, Chateau Noir, oil on
canvas, 29 x 38" (73.7 x 96.6 cm), National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gift of
Eugene and Agnes Meyer

183

FIG. 125 Paul Cezanne, Millstone in the Park
of the Chateau Noir, 1898-1900, oil on canvas,
29 x 363/8" (737 x 92.4 cm), Philadelphia
Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. Carroll S.
Tyson, Jr., Collection

FIG. 126 Paul Cezanne, The lied
Rock, oil on canvas, 357/8 x 26" (gi x
66 cm), Musee de I'Orangerie, Jean
Walter— Paul Guillaume ( !olle< lion

Paul Cezanne

French, 1839-1906
Seated Peasant, 1895-1900
Oil on canvas, 21 v4 x 1734"
(54.6 x 45.1 cm)

provenance: Jos Hessel, Paris; Christian
Mustad, Norway; private collection, Switzer-
land; Mrs. Ira Haupt, New York.

exhibitions: Kunstnerforbundet, Kris-
tiana, Oslo, "Den franske Utstilling," 1918,
no. 10.

literature: Elie Faure, "Toujours
Cezanne," L'Amour de I'art, December 20,
1920, repro. p. 268; Paul Jamot, "LArt fran-
cais en Norvege," La Renaissance de I'art, vol.
12, no. 2 (February 1929), p. 104, repro.
p. 86; Lionello Venturi, Cezanne: Son art —
son oeuvre (Paris, 1936), no. 691 (repro.);
Marcel Brion, Paul Cezanne (Milan, 1972), fig.
3, p. 156; Sandra Orienti, Tout I'oeuvre peint
de Cezanne (Paris, 1975), no. 605 (repro.);
John Rewald, Cezanne: A Biography (New
York, 1986), repro. p. 206.

notes

1. For the cardplayers series, see Lionello
Venturi, Cezanne: Son art— son oeuvre (Paris,
1936), no. 556-60.

2. See ibid., nos. 561, 563-68, 684-90.

3. Ambroise Vollard, Paul Cezanne (Paris,
1919), p. 124.

4. Theodore Reff, "Cezanne's 'Cardplayers'
and Their Sources," Arts Magazine, vol. 55,
no. 3 (November 1980), p. 114.

5. Cezanne noted when walking in the
street late in his life: "Look at the old cafe
proprietor seated before his doorway.
What style!" See Theodore Reff, "Paint-
ing and Theory in the Final Decade," in
The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
Cezanne: The Late Work (New York, 1977),
p. 22.

6. See John Rewald, "The Last Motifs at
Aix," in The Museum of Modern Art, 1977,
p. 99. See also John Rewald, Cezanne:

A Biography (New York, 1986), pp. 258-59.

7. See Rewald, 1986, p. 220.

8. Venturi, 1936, no. 691, assigns the work
to 1895-1900.

9. John Rewald, The Paintings of Cezanne:
A Catalogue Raisonne (forthcoming).

10. See Venturi, 1936, nos. 685, 689.

Foundation, Merion, Pa.

184

fig. 128 Paul Cezanne, Gustave
Geffroy, 1895, oil on canvas, 4534 x
35V8" (116.2 x 89.9 cm), Musee du
Louvre, Paris

FIG. 129 Paul Cezanne, Standing
Peasant, oil on canvas, 31'/* x 22'/2"
(80 x 57.1 cm), The Barnes Founda-
tion, Merion, Pa.

FIG. 130 Paul Cezanne, Portrait of a
Peasant, oil on canvas, 36'^ x 28^/4"
(92 x 73 cm). National Gallery of
Canada, Ottawa

Paul Cezanne

French, 1839-1906

Still Life with Watermelon and

Pomegranates, 1900-1906
Watercolor and pencil on paper,
12 x i8'/2" (30.5 x 47 cm)

PROVENANCE: Galerie Bernheim-Jeune,
Paris; Percy Moore Turner, London; Galerie
Matthiesen, Berlin; Christian Tetzenlund,
Copenhagen; Otto Wacker, Berlin; possibly
Bernheim-Jeune; possibly Reid and Lefevre
Gallery, London; Mrs. A. Chester Beatty,
London; Paul Rosenberg, New York.

exhibitions: Montross Gallery, New York,
"Cezanne," through January 1916, no. 8;
Galerie Alfred Flechtheim, Berlin,
"Cezanne," 1927, no. 35; Reid and Lefevre
Gallery, London, "Cezanne," 1937, no. 32;
Wildenstein and Co., London, "Homage to
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)," July 1939, no. 66;
The Tate Gallery, London, Museum and Art
Gallery, Leicester, and Graves Art Gallery,
Sheffield, "Paul Cezanne: An Exhibition of
Watercolours ," 1946, no. 28; Philadelphia
Museum of Art, "Philadelphia Private Collec-
tors," summer 1963 (no catalogue); The Tate
Gallery, London, "The Annenberg Collec-
tion," September 2-October 8, 1969, no. 7.

LITERATURE: Willard Huntington Wright,
"Paul Cezanne," The International Studio, vol.
57 (February 1916), p. 130; Julius Meier-
Graefe, ed., Cezanne und seine Ahnen, Faksi-
miles nach Aquarellen, Feder — und anderen
Zeichnungen von Tintoretto, Greco, Poussin,
Corot, Delacroix, Cezanne (Munich, 1921), pi.
XVII; Georges Riviere, he Maitre Paul Cezanne
(Paris, 1923), p. 221; Lionello Venturi,
Cezanne: Son art— son oeuvre (Paris, 1936),
no. 1145 (repro.); Alfred Neumeyer, Cezanne
Drawings (New York and London, 1958),
p. 26, pi. 55; John Rewald, Paul Cezanne: The
Water colors, A Catalogue Raisonne ( Boston,
1983), no. 561 (repro).

185

NOTES

1. "Le dessin et la couleur ne sont point dis-
tincts; au fur et a mesure que Ion peint, on
dessine; plus la couleur s'harmonise, plus le
dessin se precise. Quand la couleur est sa
richesse, la forme est sa plenitude. Les con-
trastes et les rapports de tons, voila le secret
du dessin et du modele." Em i le Bernard, Sou-
venirs sur Paul Cezanne: Une Conversation avec
Cezanne, la methode de Cezanne (Paris, 1925),
p. 37 (author's trans.).

2. This object may be the sugar bowl with
handles that appears in some of the late still
lifes; see Lionello Venturi, Cezanne: Son art-
son oeuvre (Paris, 1936), no. 624.

3. See Alfred Neumeyer, Cezanne Drawings
(New York and London, 1958), pp. 26, 51.

4. John Rewald, Paul Cezanne: The Water-
colors, A Catalogue Raisonne' (Boston, 1983),
p. 229.

fig. 131 Paul Cezanne (French, 1839-1906),
Still Life with Pomegranates, Carafe, Sugar
Bowl, Bottle, and Melon, 1900— 1906, pencil
and vvatri ( 0I01 on paper, 11^4 x !534"
(30 x 40 ( in), private collection, Switzerland

FIG. 132 Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Cut
Melon, c. 1900, pencil and watercolor on
paper, 12^/8 x i8s4" (31-5 x 47-6 cm), private
collection

Paul Cezanne

French, 1839-1906
Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1904
Watercolor on paper, i25/s x gs/4"
(32.1 x 24.8 cm)

PROVENANCE: Emile Bernard; Michel-Ange
Bernard; Wildenstein and Co., New York.

exhibitions: Philadelphia Museum of Art,
"Philadelphia Private Collectors," summer
1963 (no catalogue); The Tate Gallery,
London, "The Annenberg Collection,"
September 2-October 8, 1969, no. 8.

literature: "Lettres inedites du peintre
Emile Bernard a sa femme a propos de la
mort de son ami Paul Cezanne," Art-Docu-
ments (Geneva), no. 33 (June 1953), repro.
p. 13; Francois Daulte, Le Dessin francais de
Manet a Cezanne (Lausanne, 1954), p. 66,
no. 46, pi. 46.

NOTES

1. "Lettres inedites du peintre Emile Bernard
a sa femme a propos de la mort de son ami
Paul Cezanne," Art-Documents (Geneva),

no. 33 (June 1953), repro. p. 13.

2. Francois Daulte, Le Dessin francais de Manet
a Cezanne (Lausanne, 1954), p. 66, no. 46
(image reversed).

3. See Emile Bernard, Souvenirs sur Paul
Cezanne (Paris, 1926).

4. )ean-Jacques Luthi, Emile Bernard: Cata-
logue raisonne de I'oeuvre peint (Paris, 1982),
pp. 98-99, nos. 663, 666.

5. "Lettres inedites," Art-Documents, 1953,
p. 13 (author's trans.).

186

Paul Cezanne

French, 1839-1906
Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-6
Oil on canvas, 22'4 x 38V8"
(56.6 x g6.8 cm)

provenance: Paul Cezanne fils; Ambroise
Vollard and Bernheiin-Jeune, Paris, 1907;
Montag, Switzerland.

exhibitions: The Tate Gallery, London,
"The Annenberg Collection," September 2—
October 8, 1969, no. g.

literature: John Rewald and Leo Mar-
schutz, "Cezanne et la Provence," Le Point,
vol. 4 (August 1936), repro. p. 22; Lionello
Venturi, Cezanne: Son art— son oeuvre (Paris,
1936), no. 804 (repro.); Fritz Novotny,
Cezanne und das Ende der wissenschaftlichen
Perspektive (Vienna, 1938), pp. 11, 204, no.
94; Kurt Badt, The Art of Cezanne, translated
by Sheila Ann Ogilvie (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1965), p. 163; Charles Ferdinand
Ramuz, Cezanne: Formes (Lausanne, 1968),
fig. 28; A. Barskaya, Paul Cezanne, translated
by N.Johnstone (Leningrad, 1975), repro.
p. 191; Sandra Orienti, Tout I'oeuvre peint
de Cezanne (Paris, 1975), no. 765 (repro);
Lawrence Cowing, "The Logic of Orga-
nized Sensations," in The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, Cezanne: The Late
Work (New York, 1977), p. 68, fig. 125; Gene-
vieve Monnier, 'Aquarelles de la derniere
periode (1895-1906)," in Grand Palais, Paris,
Cezanne: Les dernieres annees (1895-1906)
(Paris, 1978), p. 45; Sandra Orienti, L'Opera
completa di Cezanne, 2nd ed. (Milan, 1979),
no. 765 (repro.); Jean Arrouye, "Le Depasse-
ment de la nostalgic" in Cezanne: Ou la pein-
ture en jeu (Limoges, 1982), p. 131; Robert
Tiers, "Le Testament de Paul Cezanne et
l'inventaire des tableaux de sa succession, rue
Boulegon a Aix, en 1906," Gazette des Beaux-
Arts, 127th year, 6th period, vol. 106
(November 1985), p. 178.

NOTES

1. Two pictures in this exhibition are inti-
mately related to the Jas de Bouffan: Portrait
of Uncle Dominique as a Monk(p- 73)>docu-
mented as having been done in the house,
and Seated Peasant (p. 82), which shows one
of the farm workers from the grounds and,
in all likelihood, was also done there.

2. Earlier images of the mountain were done
by Francois Granet (1775-1849) and Emile
Loubon (1809-1863).

3. Among his works, only the occurrences of
the bather motif exceed in number those of
Mont Sainte-Victoire.

4. This summary of the variety of views is
from John Rewald, Paul Cezanne: The Water-
colors (Boston, 1983), p. 240, no. 595.

5. Lionello Venturi, Paul Cezanne— Water Col-
ours (London, 1943), p. 37; quoted in
Rewald, 1983, p. 237, no. 587.

6. Joachim Gasquet, Cezanne (Paris, 1926),
p. 135 (author's trans.).

7. Rewald, 1983, p. 239, no. 593.

8. See ibid., no. 593.

9. See ibid., no. 594.

10. Lionello Venturi, Cezanne: Son art — son
oeuvre (Paris, 1936), no. 804.

11. This speculation on the additions to the
painting and the state of any one section dur-
ing these transitions was established by a
close physical examination of the painting
with Mark Tucker, Philadelphia Museum of
Art.

12. See Emile Bernard, "Les Aquarelles de
Cezanne," LAmour de I'art, no. 2 (February
1924). P- 34-

13. This size canvas is a "no. 15, Marine,"
listed in an inventory of commercially avail-
able canvases numbered o to 120 and divided
into three categories— figures, landscapes,
and marines — by Galerie Stiebel, 5 Faubourg
Saint-Honore, Paris.

14. Allowing for possibly cut tacking edges,
fourteen of the late Mont Sainte-Victoires are
within one or two centimeters of standard

sizes, ranging upward from a no. 25 "figure"
(six of the fourteen are this size). Only those
in Venturi, 1936, nos. 664, 666, and 801, do
not match any listed size.

15. Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., Degas
(New York, 1988), p. 202.

16. The addition is somewhat evident in the
c. 1935 photograph and is also clear upon
examination of the picture.

17. See Adrien Chappuis, The Drawings of Paul
Cezanne: A Catalogue Raisonne (Greenwich,
Conn., 1973), nos. 765, 768, 784.

18. The Cutting is in the Bayerische Staats-
gemaldesammlungen, Munich. See also Ven-
turi, 1936, nos. 50, 315.

19. See ibid., nos. 583, 584; see also John
Rewald, "Chocquet and Cezanne," in Studies
in Post-Impressionism, edited by Irene Gordon
and Frances Wei tzenh offer (New York, 1985),
pp. 166, 185, no. 84.

20. Quoted in The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, Cezanne: The Late Work (New York,
1977). P- 4°5- no- 61.

21. John Rewald, ed., Paul Cezanne: Letters
(London, 1941), p. 234, no. 147.

FIG. 133 Photograph of Mont
Sainte-Victoire seen from Les
Lauves, by John Rewald, c. 1935,
John Rewald Collection

187

FIG. 134 Paul Cezanne (French,
1839-1906), Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les
Lauves, 1902-6, pencil and watercolor on
paper, i8"/i6 x 2i'/.6" (47.5 x 53.5 cm), Peter
Nathan Collection, Zurich

FIG. 136 A c. 1935 photograph of Mont
Sainte-Victoire published in Lionello Venturi,
Cezanne: Son art—son oeuvre (Paris, 1936)
(courtesy John Rewald)

FIG. 135 Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
Seen from Les Lauves, 1902-6, pencil and
watercolor on paper, 13 x 283/8 " (33 x 72 cm),
private collection, N.Y.

FIG. 137 The white lines clarify the artist's
additions to Mont Sainte-Victoire

fig. 138 Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
Seen from Les Lauves, 1902-6, pencil and
watercolor on paper, i8"/,6 x 24V16" (47.5 x
61.5 cm), National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

188

FIG. 139 Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte -Vic toire
Seen from Les Lauves, c. 1906, oil on canvas,
235/3 x 283/4" (60 x 73 cm), Pushkin State
Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

FIG. 141 Paul Cezanne, Landscape, graphite
on paper from two pages of a sketchbook,
4V16 x 143/8" (11.6 x 36.4 cm), Philadelphia
Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Walter
H. Annenberg

Paul Gauguin

French, 1848-1903
The Siesta, 1892-94

Oil on canvas, 34^ X 45"/i6" (87 x 116 cm)

provenance: Ambroise Vollard, Paris;
Wilhelm Hansen, Copenhagen; Alphonse
Kann, Paris; Prince Matsukata, Paris; Wil-
denstein and Co., New York; Mrs. Ira Haupt,
New York.

exhibitions: Kunsthaus, Zurich, "Franzo-
sische Kunst des XIX und XX Jahrhunderts,"
October 5-November 14, 1917, no. 103; The
Museum of Modern Art, New York, "Paint-
ings from Private Collections," May 31-Sep-
tember 5, 1955, p. 10; Wildenstein and Co.,
New York, "Loan Exhibition: Gauguin,"
April 5-May 5, 1956, no. 38; The Art Insti-
tute of Chicago and The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, "Gauguin: Paint-
ings, Drawings, Prints, Sculpture," February
12-May 31, 1959, no. 50; Wildenstein and
Co., New York, "Masterpieces: A Memorial
Exhibition for Adele R. Levy," April 6-May 7,
1961, no. 44; Na;ional Gallery of Art, Wash-
ington, D.C., and The Art Institute of Chi-
cago, "The Art of Paul Gauguin," May 1,
1988-December 11, 1988, no. 128.

literature: Marius-Ary Leblond, Peintres
de races (Brussels, 1909), repro. opp. p. 214;
K. Madsen, Catalogue de la collection Wilhelm
Hansen (1918), no. 141; Ernest Dumonthier,
"La Collection Wilhelm Hansen," Revue de
I'Art Ancien et Moderne, December 1922,
repro. p. 342; Maurice Malingue, Gauguin
(Paris, 1943), p. 155, pi. 107; Maurice Malin-
gue, Gauguin: Le Peintre et son oeuvre ( Paris,
1948), no. 187 (repro.); Lee van Dovski, Paul
Gauguin, oder die Flucht von der Zivilisation
(Zurich, 1950), p. 350, no. 302; J. Taralon,
Gauguin (Paris, 1953), repro. p. 7, fig. 38;
Bernard Dorival, ed., Paul Gauguin: Garnet
de Tahiti (Paris, 1954), vol. 1, pp. 19-20, 28;
"The Museum of Modern Art: Paintings

189

from Private Collections," The Museum of
Modern Art Bulletin, vol. 22, no. 4 (summer

1955) , no. 44, repro. p. 121; Herbert Read,
"Gauguin: Return to Symbolism," Art News,
November 1956, repro. p. 129 (detail on
cover); Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 98th year, 6th
period, vol. 47 (1956), repro. opp. p. 160;

B. H. Friedman, "Current and Forthcoming
Exhibitions," The Burlington Magazine, vol. 98
(June 1956), p. 212; John Rewald, Post-Impres-
sionism from Van Gogh to Gauguin (New York,

1956) , p- 532> repro. p. 533; Raymond Cog-
niat, Gauguin (Paris, 1957), repro. p. 64;
John Rewald, Gauguin Drawings (New York
and London, 1958), p. 28; Rene Huyghe,
Gauguin, translated by Helen C. Slonim
(New York, 1959), repro. p. 64; Georges
Boudaille, Gauguin (Paris, 1963), p. 175,
repro. p. 176; Georges Wildenstein, Gauguin,
vol. 1, Catalogue (Paris, 1964), no. 515
(repro.); Charles Chasse, Gauguin sans
le'gendes (Paris, 1965), repro. pp. 128-29;
"Gauguin: The Hidden Tradition," Art News,
vol. 65, no. 4 (summer 1966), repro. p. 26;
Marilyn Hunt, "Gauguin and His Circle," in
Gauguin and the Decorative Style (New York,
1966), n.p. (repro.); Paul C. Nicholls, Gau-
guin (New York, 1967), pp. 29-30, pi. 60;
Francoise Cachin, Gauguin: Biographie (Paris,
1968), pp. 221, 286, 375, fig. 160, repro.
(back cover); Ronald Pickvance, The Drawings
of Gauguin (London, New York, Sydney, and
Toronto, 1970), p. 33; Daniel Wildenstein
and Raymond Cogniat, Paul Gauguin, trans-
lated by Maria Paola De Benedetti (Milan,
1972), repro. p. 59; Lee van Dovski, Die
Wahrheit uber Gauguin (Darmstadt, 1973),

no. 302; Richard S. Field, Paul Gauguin:
Monotypes (Philadelphia, 1973), p. 25; Linnea
Stonesifer Dietrich, 'A Study of Symbolism in
the Tahitian Painting of Paul Gauguin:
1891-1893," Ph.D. diss., University of Dela-
ware, Newark, 1973, pp. 142, 140-49, 210;
Richard Sampson Field, Paul Gauguin: The
Paintings of the First Voyage to Tahiti (New York
and London, 1977) pp. 136-41, 273-74, 327>

G. M. Sugana, L'Opera completa di Gauguin,
2nd ed. (Milan, 1981) no. 340 (repro.);
Michel Hoog, Paul Gauguin: Life and Work,
translated by Constance Devanthery-Lewis
(New York, 1987), pp. 241-42, pi. 135; Fran-
coise Cachin, Gauguin (Paris, 1988), pp. 155,
158, pi. 164.

NOTES

1. The painting was first reproduced in 1909
under the title "Dans la case" in Marius-Ary
Leblond, Peintres de races (Brussels, 1909),
repro. opp. p. 214. It was exhibited at the
Kunsthaus, Zurich, in the exhibition "Franzo-
sische Kunst des XIX und xx Jahrhunderts,"
October 5-November 14, 1917, no. 103, and in
1918 in Frankfurt as "Scene des iles ocea-
niques." A description of the work four years
later, then in the Wilhelm Hansen Collection
in Copenhagen, entitled it "Souvenir des iles
de la Mer du Sud"; Ernest Dumonthier, "La
Collection Wilhelm Hansen," Revue de VArt
Ancien et Moderne, December 1922, p. 342.

2. Richard Brettell et al., The Art of Paul Gau-
guin (Washington, DC, and Chicago, 1988),
p. 232.

3. For information on the little-known Alsa-
tian photographer Charles Spitz, see Marilyn
S. Kushner, The Lure of Tahiti: Gauguin, His
Predecessors and Followers (New Brunswick,
N. J., 1988), pp. 10-12.

4. Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa, edited by Jean
Loize (Paris, 1966), p. 24.

5. John Rewald, Post-Impressionism from Van
Gogh to Gauguin (New York, 1956), p. 532.

6. See Paul Gauguin's Intimate Journals, trans-
lated by Van Wyck Brooks (New York, 1936),
pp. 56-57, 115-16; and Brettell et al., 1988,
pp. 214-15.

7. The Dream, 1897, Courtauld Institute Gal-
leries, London; see Georges Wildenstein,
Gauguin, vol. 1, Catalogue (Paris, 1964), no.
557-

8. Michel Hoog, Paul Gauguin: Life and Work,
translated by Constance Devanthery-Lewis

(New York, 1987), pp. 241, 244.
g. Gauguin explicitly mentioned the striking
perspective of the floor pattern of Degas's
Harlequin, of which he owned a reproduction
during his stay in Tahiti. See Paul Gauguin's
Intimate Journals, 1936, p. 146.

10. Brettell et al., 1988, p. 233.

11. David Bull has graciously made available
his documentation on the conservation of
this picture.

12. Wildenstein, 1964, no. 434.

13. Ibid., no. 502.

14. These observations were made while
examining the painting with David Bull.

15. See Brettell et al., 1988, p. 233.

FIG. 142 Charles Spitz, Tahitian
Women, 1880-90, photograph
(from Autour du Monde, Paris, 1895)

L9O

FIG. 143 Ukiyo-e School (Japan, Edo
Period, c. 1600-1868), Ceremony for the
Harvest Moon, colored engraving on panel,
ios/8 x i4'/2" (26.3 x 36.8 cm), National
Museum, Tokyo

fig. 144 Location of early elements
in The Siesta

Paul Gauguin

French, 1848-1903

Still Life with Teapot and Fruit, i8g6

Signed and dated lower right:

P Gauguin 96
Oil on canvas, i8s4 x 26" (47.6 x 66 cm)

provenance: Private collection, Paris; Wil-
denstein and Co., New York.

exhibitions: Galerie Kleber, Paris, "Gau-
guin et ses amis," January 1949, no. 44; Phila-
delphia Museum of Art, "Exhibition of Phila-
delphia Private Collectors," summer 1963 (no
catalogue); National Gallery of Art, Wash-
ington, D.C., and The Art Institute of Chi-
cago, "The Art of Paul Gauguin," May 1,
1988-December u, 1988, no. 217.

literature: Victor Segalen, ed., Lettres de
Paul Gauguin a Georges-Daniel de Monfreid
(Paris and Zurich, 1918), p. 164; Maurice
Malingue, Gauguin (Paris, 1943), fig. 7; Ray-
mond Cogniat, Gauguin (Paris, 1947), fig.
107; Maurice Malingue, Gauguin: Le peintre
et son oeuvre (Paris and London, 1948),
repro. between nos. 200 and 201; Lee van
Dovski, Paul Gauguin oder die Flucht von die
Zivilisation (Zurich, 1950), p. 352, no. 340;
J. Taralon, Gauguin (Paris, 1954), fig. 50;
Georges Wildenstein, Gauguin, vol. 1, Cata-
logue (Paris, 1964), no. 554 (repro.); Charles
Chasse, Gauguin sans le'gendes (Paris, 1965),
repro. pp. 134-35; Daniel Wildenstein and
Raymond Cogniat, Paul Gauguin, translated
by Maria Paola De Benedetti (Milan, 1972),
repro. p. 79; G. M. Sugana, L'Opera completa
di Gauguin, 2nd ed. (Milan, 1981), no. 358
(repro.).

2. See Octave Mirbeau, preface, in Cezanne
(Paris, 1914); quoted in Richard Brettell et
al., The Art of Paul Gauguin (Washington,
D.C., and Chicago, 1988), p. 193.

3. Merete Bodelsen, "Gauguin, the Collec-
tor," The Burlington Magazine, vol. 112 (Sep-
tember 1970), pp. 590-615; and Merete
Bodelsen, "Gauguin's Cezannes," The Burling-
ton Magazine, vol. 104 (May 1962), pp. 204-11.
In a letter to Vollard written from Tahiti,
Gauguin claimed to have owned twelve
Cezannes. This unpublished information was
kindly given to me by John Rewald.

4. See Lionello Venturi, Cezanne: Son art— son
oeuvre (Paris, 1936), vol. 2, no. 341.

5. See Georges Wildenstein, Gauguin, vol. 1.,
Catalogue (Paris, 1964), nos. 401, 403, 404.

6. Ambroise Vollard, Souvenirs d'un marchand
de tableaux (Paris, 1937), p. 184; cited in Bret-
tell et al., 1988, p. 193.

7. See Gustave Geffroy, Claude Monet: Sa vie,
son temps, son oeuvre (Paris, 1922), p. 198; and
Emile Bernard, "Souvenirs sur Paul Cezanne
et lettres inedites," Mercure de France, vol. 69
(October 1, 1907), p. 400.

8. For a photogi aph of the wooden spoons
made by Gauguin, see Georges Wildenstein
et al., Gauguin: Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris,
1958), p- 178, fig 4-

9. Brettell et al., 1988, p. 403.

10. Ibid., p. 402.

11. Wildenstein, 1964, no. 603.

12. Ibid., no. 457.

13. Avant et apres, ms. p. 31; quoted in Bodel-
sen, 1970, p. 606 (author's trans.).

notes

1. Pissarro reported a conversation with Gau-
guin in a letter to his son, November 23,
1893; in John Rewald, ed., Camille Pissarro:
Letters to His Son Lucien, translated by Lionel
Abel (New York, 1943), p. 221.

191

fig. 145 Paul Cezanne (French, 1839-1906),
Still Life with Apples in a Compote, 1879-80, oil
on canvas, i8'/s x (46 x 54.9 cm),

private collection

FIG. 146 Paul Gauguin (French,
1848-1903), Portrait of a Woman,
with Still Life hy Cezanne, 1890, oil on
canvas, 24's/i6 x 21V8" (63.3 x 54.9
cm), The Art Institute of Chicago,
The Joseph Winterbotham
Collection

Paul Gauguin

French, 1848-1903

Three Tahitian Women, 1896

Signed and dated lower right:

P. Gauguin 96
Oil on panel, 9"/i6 x 17" (24.6 x 43.2 cm)

provenance:' Dr. Nolet, Nantes; Wilden-
stein and Co., New York; Knoedler and Co.,
New York; Mrs. Ira Haupt, New York.

exhibition: Wildenstein and Co., New
York, "Loan Exhibition: Gauguin," April
5— May 5, 1956, no. 46.

literature: Lettres de Paul Gauguin a
Georges-Daniel de Monfreid (Paris, 1946), p.
209; John Rewald, Gauguin: Drawings (New
York and London, 1958), p. 36, no. 98;
Georges Wildenstein, Gauguin, vol. 1, Cata-
logue (Paris, 1964), no. 539 (repro.); Ronald
Pickvance, The Drawings of Gauguin (Lon-
don, New York, Sydney, and Toronto, 1970),
p. 36, fig. 83; G. M. Sugana, L'Opera completa
di Gauguin, 2nd ed. (Milan, 1981), no. 366
(repro.).

NOTES

1. John Rewald, Gauguin: Drawings (New
York and London, 1958), p. 36, no. 98.

2. Food of the Gods, The Art Institute of Chi-
cago. The image was anticipated in a wood-
cut in Papeete in 1891. See Marcel Guerin,
L'Oeuvre grave de Gauguin, rev. ed. (San Fran-
cisco, 1980), no. 43.

3. John Rewald, Studies in Post-Impressionism
(New York, 198(5), p. 178. See also Victor
Segalen, ed., Lettres de Paul Gauguin a
Georges-Daniel de Monfreid (Paris and Zurich,
1918).

4. For example, The Day of the God, 1894; see
Georges Wildenstein, Gauguin, vol. 1, Cata-
logue (Paris, 1964), no. 513.

5. Quoted in Wildenstein, 1964, p. 222.

6. Ibid., p. 222, no. 539. Little is known of Dr.
Nolet, whom Gauguin may have met during
his internment in the hospital in Papeete in
July 1896 (where he was placed in a ward for
indigents), or during October of the follow-
ing year, when his physical degeneration
(which also included severe eye infection,
eczema, and syphilis) culminated in a heart
attack. Nolet seems to have found no buyers,
although he must certainly have tried. Given
Monfreid's knowledge of the picture, Nolet
must have approached him. Thwarted, Nolet
took the painting with him to Nantes, where
it remained with his descendants until Wil-
denstein purchased it.

7. See Wildenstein, 1964, nos. 564, 569.

8. Among Gauguin's reproductions of the
works of artists he admired were photo-
graphs of paintings by Puvis de Chavannes.

9. Paul Gauguin's Intimate Journals, translated
by Van Wyck Brooks (New York, 1936), p. 41.

10. Ibid., p. 241.

FIG. 147 Paul Gauguin (French,
1848-1903), letter to an unknown
collector. Collection of Mrs. Alex M.
Lewyt, N.Y.

L92

FIG. 148 Paul Gauguin, The Bathers, 1898, oi
on canvas, 2334 x 3634" (60.4 x 93.4 cm),
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,
Gift of Sam A. Lewisohn

Paul Gauguin

French, 1848-1903

Portrait of Women (Mother and Daughter),

1901 or 1902
Oil on canvas, 29 x 36*4 " (73.7 x 92.1 cm)

provenance: Ambroise Vollard, Paris;
Galerie Barbazanges, Paris, 1920-21; Prince
Matsukata, Paris; private collection, Ger-
many; Oscar Homolka, New York; Wilden-
stein and Co., New York.

exhibitions: Galerie Vollard, Paris, "Gau-
guin," November 1903, no. 6 or 4g; Galerie
Thannhauser, Munich, and Arnold Kunst
Salon, Dresden, "Collection Vollard," 1910;
L'Institut Francais, St. Petersburg, "Exposi-
tion centennale de Part francais," 1912, no.
116; Prague, "French Art: Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries," 1923, no. 185; Califor-
nia Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Fran-
cisco, "Inaugural Exposition of French Art,
in the California Palace of the Legion of
Honor," 1924-25, no. 27; Wildenstein and
Co., New York, "Loan Exhibition: Gauguin,"
April 5-May 5, 1956, no. 50; The Art Insti-
tute of Chicago and The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, "Gauguin: Paint-
ings, Drawings, Prints, Sculpture," February
12-May 31, 1959, no. 65; Philadelphia
Museum of Art, "Exhibition of Philadelphia
Private Collectors," summer 1963 (no cata-
logue); The Tate Gallery, London, "The
Annenberg Collection," September 2-
October 8, 1969, no. 18; National Gallery of
Art, Washington, D.C., and The Art Institute
of Chicago, "The Art of Paul Gauguin," May
1, 1988-December 11, 1988, no. 231.

LITERATURE: "Gauguin," Mir Iskousstva,
6th year, nos. 8-9 (1904), repro. p. 222;
Rudolf Mever-Riefstahl, "Paul Gauguin,"
Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, vol. 27
(November 1910), repro. p. 113; Charles Mor-
ice, Paul Gauguin (Paris, 1919), repro. opp. p.
236; Charles Morice, Paul Gauguin, 2nd ed.

FIG. 149 Jules Agostini or Henri
Lamasson, Two Women, c. 1894,
photograph, O'Reilly Collection,
Papeete Museum

FIG. 150 Hans Holbein the Younger
(German, 1497/98-1543), Thomas Godsalve
and His Son John, 1528, oil on panel, 13^4 x
143/.6" (35 x 36 cm), Staatliche Gemaldega-
lerie, Dresden

193

(Paris, 1920), repro. opp. p. 112; John Gould
Fletcher, Paul Gauguin: His Life and Art (New
York, 1921), repro. opp. p. 95; "Gauguin,"
L'Art et les Artistes, n.s., 20th year, vol. 61
(November 1925), repro. (cover); Arsene
Alexandre, Paul Gauguin: Sa vie et le sens de
son oeuvre (Paris, 1930), repro. p. 105; Lee
van Dovski, Gauguin, der Meister von Tahiti
(Basel, 1947), pi. 20; Lee van Dovski, Paul
Gauguin oder die Flucht von die Zivilisation
(Zurich, 1950), p. 353, no. 368; Herbert
Read, "Gauguin: Return to Symbolism," Art
News, November 1956, repro. p. 139; John
Richardson, "Gauguin at Chicago and New
York," The Burlington Magazine, vol. 101 (May
1959), p. 191; Georges Wildenstein, Gauguin,
vol. 1, Catalogue (Paris, 1964), no. 610
(repro.); P. O'Reilly, Catalogue du Muse'e Gau-
guin, Tahiti (Paris, 1965), p. 63; Bengt Dan-
ielsson, Gauguin in the South Seas, translated
by Reginald Spink (London, 1965), fig. 37;
Merete Bodelsen, "The Gauguin Catalogue
( Wildenstein-Cogniat)," The Burlington Maga-
zine, vol. 108 (January 1966), p. 38; Paul Gau-
guin, Noa Noa, edited by Jean Loize (Paris,
1966), pp. 122-23, 192-93> repro. opp. p. 25;
Francoise Cachin; Gauguin: Biographie (Paris,
1968), pp. 313, 376, fig. 180; Daniel Wilden-
stein and Ravmond Cogniat, Paul Gauguin,
translated by Maria Paola De Benedetti
(Milan, 1972), repro. p. 70; G. M. Sugana,
1. Opera completa di Gauguin, 2nd ed. (Milan,
1981), no. 434 (repro.); Yann le Pichon, Gau-
guin: Life, Art, Inspiration, translated by I.
Mark Paris ( New York, 1986), pp. 242-43;
Francoise Cachin, Gauguin (Paris, 1988),
p. 248, pi. 669.

NOTES

1. Galerie Vollard, Paris, "Gauguin,"
November 1903, no. 6 or 49.

2. Arsene Alexandre, Paul Gauguin: Sa vie et
le sens de son oeuvre ( Paris, 1930), p. 105.

3. See Richard Brettell et al.. The Art of Paul
Gauguin (Washington, DC, and Chicago,
1988), no. 231.

4. Compare, for example, Apple Trees in the
Hermitage, Neighborhood of Pontoise, Aargauer
Kunsthaus, Aarau (see Georges Wildenstein,
Gauguin, vol. 1, Catalogue [Paris, 1964], no.
33)-

5. Bengt Danielsson, Gauguin in the South
Seas, translated by Reginald Spink (London,
1965), pp. 180, 286, no. 153.

fj. These are Pape Moe of 1893, private collec-
tion, and Girl with a Fan of 1902, Museum
Folkwang, Essen.

7. Two women in union, although never with
this difference in age, was a recurring motif
in Gauguin's oeuvre. One thinks of the
hushed figures in Nevermore (Courtauld
Institute Galleries, London), or Two Tahitian
Women of 1899 at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York, or, more relevant here, the
late transfer drawings done in the Mar-
quesas; however, the Annenberg picture
purges its relationship of any immediate nar-
rative or sensuous interaction, moving onto a
more general and profound level. The title
Mother and Daughter applied to this picture
has little cause other than to satisfy our
desire to make it more concrete and explicit.
The identities of the figures now seem to be
resolved: Richard Brettell et al. convey that,
according to an interview with Mme Man-
hard, the younger woman is her grand-
mother, Teahu A Raatairi, and the older fig-
ure Teahu's aunt by marriage (Brettell et al.,
1988, p. 426).

8. Holbein's London was centuries and miles
from Gauguin's Tahiti; the powerful English
lord in a different realm from that of Teahu
A Raatairi and her elderly aunt. Yet the Tahi-
tian women lose none of their dignity by the
comparison, and Gauguin's examination of
the cycle of life is made no less compelling or
uplifting by the grounded simplicity of his
Tahitian portrait.

Vincent van Gogh

Dutch, 1853-1890
The Bouquet, c. 1886

Oil on canvas, 25V2 x 2P/8" (65 x 53.8 cm)

provenance: Jules Andorko, Paris; Druet
Art Gallery, Paris; Mr. and Mrs. Charles Vil-
drac Gallery, Paris; Baron Frans Havatny,
Budapest; Marie Harriman Gallery, New
York; Governor and Mrs. W. Averell Harri-
man, New York.

exhibitions: Galerie Bernheim-Jeune,
Paris, "Vincent van Gogh, L'Epoque fran-
chise," June 20-July 2, 1927; Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam, "Stedelijke tentoon-
stelling, Vincent Van Gogh en zijn tijdgenoot-
en," September 6-November 2, 1930, no. 73;
Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, "Nineteenth-
Century French Art: Paintings, Watercolors,
Drawings, Prints, Sculpture," November
1-30, 1932, no. 61; Pennsylvania Museum
(Philadelphia Museum of Art), "Flowers in
Art," April l-May 1, 1933; California Palace
of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco,
"French Painting," June 8-July 8, 1934,
no. 158; The William Rockhill Nelson Gal-
lery of Art and The Mary Atkins Museum of
Fine Arts, Kansas City, "One Hundred Years:
French Painting, 1820-1920," March 31-
April 28, 1935, no. 63; The Museum of Mod-
ern Art, New York, "Vincent van Gogh,"
December 1935— January 1936, no. 47; Marie
Harriman Gallery, New York, "Paul Cezanne,
Andre Derain, Walt Kuhn, Henri Matisse,
Pablo Picasso, Auguste Renoir, Vincent Van
Gogh," February 17— March 14, 1936, no. 16;
City Art Museum, Saint Louis, "The Devel-
opment of Flower Painting from the Seven-
teenth Century to the Present," May '937.
no. 38; The Museum of Modern Art Gallery,
Washington, DC, "Flowers and Fruits," 1938,
no. 20; Marie Harriman Gallery, New York,
"Flowers, Fourteen American, Fourteen
French Artists," April 8— May 4, 1940,
no. 27; The Detroit Institute of Arts, "Exhi-

19 1

bition of Flower Paintings," May 15- June 23,
1940, no. 47; Los Angeles County Museum,
'Aspects of French Painting from Cezanne to
Picasso," January 15-March 2, 1941, no. 55;
Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, "Exposition
de chefs-d'oeuvre de la peinture," February
5-March 8, 1942, no. 22; Wildenstein and
Co., New York, "The Art and Life of Vincent
Van Gogh," October 6-November 7, 1943,
no. 43; Wildenstein and Co., New York,
"Loan Exhibition: Van Gogh," March 24-
April 30, 1955, no. 43; Corcoran Gallery of
Art, Washington, D.C., "Visionaries and
Dreamers," April 7-May 27, 1956, no. 38;
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 'A World of
Flowers: Paintings and Prints," May 2-June
9, 1963, no. 148.

literature: J.-B. de la Faille, L'Oeuvre de
Vincent van Gogh: Catalogue raisonne (Paris
and Brussels, 1928), no. 588 (repro.); Henri
Marceau and Horace H.F Jayne, "Flowers in
Art: An Exhibition," The Pennsylvania
Museum Bulletin (Philadelphia Museum of
Art), vol. 28, no. 154 (March 1933), repro.
p. 62; Alfred H. Barr, Jr., ed., Vincent van
Gogh (New York, 1935), no. 47 (repro.); A.M.
Frankfurter, "Cezanne, ...Van Gogh in an
Informal Show," Art News, vol. 34, no. 21
(February 22, 1936), p. 5 (repro.); W. Scher-
jon and Joseph de Gruyter, Vincent van Gogh's
Great Period: Aries, St. Re'my, and Auvers sur
Oi5e(Amsterdam,i937),no. 193 (repro.); Louis
Hautecoeur, Van Gogji (Monaco and Geneva,
1946), repro. p. 95; Art News, vol. 54, no. 2
(April 1955), repro. (cover); J.-B. de la Faille,
The Works of Vincent van Gogh: His Paintings
and Drawings (Amsterdam, 1970), no. 588
(repro.); Paolo Lecaldano, L'Opera pittorica
completa di van Gogh e i suoi nessi grafici
(Milan, 1971), vol. 2, no. 551 (repro.); Jacques
Lassaigne, Vincent van Gogh (Milan, 1972),
repro. p. 45; Peter Mitchell, Great Flower
Painters: Four Centuries of Floral Art (New
York, 1973), no. 304 (repro.); Jan Hulsker,
The Complete Van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings,
Sketches (New York, 1980), no. 1335 (repro.).

NOTES

1. Translated in Jan Hulsker, The Complete Van
Gogh: Paintings, Drawings, Sketches (New York,
1980), p. 234.

2. See ibid., nos. 1091-94, 1125-50.

3. Van Gogh had lived twice before in Paris
working for the art dealer Goupil, briefly in
1874 and again from May 1, 1875, to April 1,
1876, when he was dismissed.

4. See Musee d'Orsay, Paris, "Van Gogh a
Paris," February 2-May 15, 1988.

5. Hulsker, 1980, p. 300.

6. J.-B. de la Faille, L'Oeuvre de Vincent van
Gogh: Catalogue raisonne' ( Paris and Brussels,
1928), no. 588; this placement of the picture
in the Aries period has been followed in most
of the later literature.

7. J.-B. de la Faille, The Works of Vincent Van
Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings (Amster-
dam, 1970), p. 242, no. 588.

8. Walter Feilchenfeldt discussed this late dat-
ing at the symposium 'Aspects of Impression-
ism and Post-Impressionism," Philadelphia
Museum of Art, June 25, 1989.

9. See John Rewald, "Theo Van Gogh, Gou-
pil, and the Impressionists," Gazette des
Beaux-Arts, 115th year, 6th period, vol. 81
(January 1973), pp. 8, 9.

10. For a summation of Van Gogh's interest in
Monticelli, and a review of his mention of the
artist in his letters, see Aaron Sheon, Monti-
celli: His Contemporaries, His Influence (Pitts-
burgh, 1978), pp. 82-88.

11. Hulsker, 1980, no. 1140. Assigned by the
author to July-September 1886.

FIG. 151 Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917;,
Woman with Chrysanthemums, 1865, oil on
paper applied to canvas, 29 x $6'A" (73.7 x
92.7 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
NY, The H.Q Havemeyer Collection

(French, 1824-1886), Vase of Flowers,
c. 1875, oil on panel, 20 x 153/8 (51 x
39 cm), Stedelijk Museum,

Amsterdam

195

FIG. 153 Vincent van Gogh (Dutch,
1853-1890), Bowl with Zinnias, 1886,
oil on canvas, 24 x i8'/8" (61 x 45.5
cm), Mr. and Mrs. David Lloyd
Kreeger Collection, Washington, DC.

Vincent van Gogh

Dutch, 1853-1890

La Berceuse (Wbman Rocking a Cradle),
1889

Signed on the arm of the chair: Vincent
Aries 89; inscribed lower right:
La Berceuse

Oil on canvas, '36v4 x 29" (92.8 x 73.7 cm)

provenance: Augustine Roulin, Marseille;
Joseph Roulin, Marseille; Ambroise Vollard
Art Gallery, Paris, 1895; Amedee Schuffe-
necker, Saint-Maur; Leon Marseille Art Gal-
lery, Paris; Tanner Art Gallery, Zurich;
Rudolf Staechelin, Basel; Wildenstein and
Co., New York.

exhibitions: Paris, "Exposition Retro-
spective Vincent van Gogh, Societe des
Artistes Independants: Catalogue de la 2i,eme
exposition 1905," 1905, no. 39; Kunsthalle,
Basel, "Vincent van Gogh," March-April
1924, no. 38; Kunsthalle, Bern, "Franzo-
sische Meister des 19. Jahrhunderts und Van
Gogh," February-April 1934, no. 61; Palais
de Tokyo, Paris, "Van Gogh: Exposition
internationale de 1937, Group I, Classe III,"
1937, no. 36; Galerie M. Schulthess, Basel,
"Zwei Ausstellungen aus Privatbesitz in der
Schweiz— Meister werke Hollandischer
Malerei des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts im
Kunstmuseum: 25 Werke von Vincent van
Gogh," June 23-August 19, 1945, no. 13;
Kunstmuseum Basel, "Sammlung Rudolf
Staechelin: Gedachtnis-Ausstellung zum 10.
Todesjahr des Sammlers," May 13- June 17,
1956, no. 38; Musee National dArt Moderne,
Paris, "Fondation Rodolphe Staechelin, de
Corot a Picasso," April 10-June 28, 1964,
no. 32; The Tate Gallery, London, "The
Annenberg Collection," September 2-
October 8, 1969, no. 19.

literature: Oeuvres posthumes de G. -Albert
Aurier, avec un autographe de I'auteur et un

portrait grave' a I'eau-forte par A.-M. Lauzet...
(Paris, 1893), p. 263; Ambroise Vollard, ed.,
Lettres de Vincent van Gogh a Emile Bernard
(Paris, 1911), p. 145, repro. p. 157; Theodore
Duret, Van Gogh, Vincent, edition definitive
(Paris, 1919), p. 53; Gustave Coquiot, Vincent
van Gogh (Paris, 1923), repro. opp. p. 288;
Louis Pierard, The Tragic Life of Vincent van
Gogh, translated by Herbert Garland (Lon-
don, 1925), fig. 98; Paul Colin, Van Gogh,
translated by Beatrice Moggridge (New York,
1926), fig. 23; Florent Fels, Vincent van Gogh
(Paris, 1928), repro. p. 207; J.-B. de la Faille,
L'Oeuvre de Vincent van Gogh: Catalogue rai-
sonne ( Paris and Brussels, 1928), vol. 1,
no. 505 (repro.); R. H. Wilenski, French
Painting (Boston, 1931), p. 297, n. 1; Charles
Terrasse, Van Gogh: Peintre (Paris, 1935),
repro. between pp. 122 and 129; W. Scherjon
and Joseph de Gruyter, Vincent van Gogh's
Great Period: Aries, St. Re'my, and Auvers sur
Oise (Amsterdam, 1937), no. 149 (repro.);
Douglas Lord, ed. and trans., Vincent van
Gogh: Letters to Emile Bernard (New York,
1938), pp. 97, 102, n. 7; J.-B. de la Faille, Vin-
cent van Gogh, translated by Prudence Mon-
tagu-Pollock (New York and Paris, 1939),
repro. opp. p. 432; R. H. Wilenski, Modern
French Painters (New York, 1940), p. 214;
Edward Alden Jewell, Vincent van Gogh (New
York, 1946), pp. 79-80, repro. p. 72; Georg
Schmidt, Van Gogh (Bern, 1947), pi. 26;
Maurice Raynal and Jean Leymarie, History of
Modern Painting from Baudelaire to Bonnard
(Geneva, 1949), repro. p. 68; Werner Weis-
bach, Vincent van Gogh: Kunst und Schicksal,
vol. 2, Kiinstlerischer Aufstieg und F.nde (Basel,
1951), pp. 130-34, fig. 58; Paul Cachet, Vin-
cent van Gogh aux "Independants" (Paris,
1953); Frank Elgar, Van Gogh: Leben und W'erk
(Munich and Zurich, 1958), pp. 161-62;
August Kuhn-Foelix, Vincent van Gogh: Fine
Psychographie (Bergen, 1958), p. 138, fig. 28;
J. G. van Gelder, A Detailed Catalogue with
Full Documentation of 272 Works by Vincent van
Gogh Belonging to the Collection of the State

L96

Museum Kroller-Muller, with an Essay on Van
Gogh's Childhood Drawings (Otterlo, 1959),
p. 80; Pierre Cabanne, Van Gogh (Paris,
1961), pp. 181, 188; H. R. Graetz, The Symbolic
Language of Vincent van Gogh (New York,
Toronto, and London, 1963), pp. 165-67,
174-75; J.-B. ^e 'a Faille, The Works of Vincent
van Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings
(Amsterdam, 1970), no. 505 (repro.); Mark
Roskill, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and French Paint-
ing of the 1880s: A Catalogue Raisonne of Key
Works (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1970), pp. 83-85;
Paolo Lecaldano, L'Opera pittorica completa di
Van Gogh, e i suoi nessi grafici (Milan, 1971),
vol. 2, no. 637 (repro.); Jacques Lassaigne,
Vincent van Gogh (Milan, 1972), fig. 3;
Matthias Arnold, "Duktus und Bildform bei
Vincent van Gogh," Ph.D. diss., Ruprecht-
Karl University, Heidelberg, 1973, p. 173;
Brian Petrie, Van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings,
and Prints (London, 1974), no. 83 (repro.);
Marcel Heiman, "Psychoanalytic Observa-
tions on the Last Painting and Suicide of Vin-
cent van Gogh," The International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, vol. 57 (1976), pp. 71-73, 78;
Arthur F. Valenstein and Anne Stiles Wylie,
'A Discussion of the Paper by Marcel Heiman
on 'Psychoanalytic Observations on the Last
Painting and Suicide of Vincent van Gogh,' "
The International Journal of Psycho -Analysis,
vol. 57(1976), pp. 82-83; Nicolai Cikovsky,
Jr., "Van Gogh and a Photograph: A Note on
'La Berceuse,'" New Mexico Studies in the Fine
Arts, vol. 3 (1978), pp. 23-28; Hope B. Wer-
ness, Vincent van Gogh: The Influences of Nine-
teenth-Century Illustrations (Tallahassee,
1980), p. 12; Jan Hulsker, The Complete Van
Gogh: Paintings, Drawings, Sketches (New York,
ig8o), pp. 380, 386-87, 484, no. 1669
(repro.); Evert van Uitert, "Vincent van Gogh
and Paul Gauguin in Competition: Vincent's
Original Contribution," Simiolus, vol. 11, no. 2
(1980), pp. 83-86; Bogomila Welsh-
Ovcharov, Vincent van Gogh and the Birth of
Cloisonism (Toronto, 1981), pp. 148-49; Evert
van Uitert, "Van Gogh's Concept of His

Oeuvrer Simiolus, vol. 12, no. 4 (1981-82),
pp. 233-34, 242- Ronald Pickvance, Van
Gogh in Aries (New York, 1984), pp. 246, 248;
Naomi E. Maurer, "The Pursuit of Spiritual
Knowledge: The Philosophical Meaning and
Origins of Symbolist Theory and Its Expres-
sion in the Thought and Art of Odilon
Redon, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gau-
guin," Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago,
1985, vol. 1, pp. 783-88; Susan Alyson Stein,
ed., Van Gogh: A Retrospective (New York,
1986), repro. p. 192; Philippe Huisman, Van
Gogh Portraits, translated by Diana Imber
(New York, n.d.), pp. 50, 52, fig. 20.

NOTES

1. See Jan Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh:
Paintings, Drawings, Sketches (New York,
1980), nos. 1665, 1669, 1670, 1671, 1672. The
baby in the cradle is Marcelle Roulin, born
July 31, 1888.

2. Oeuvres posthumes de G.- Albert Aurier, avec
un autographe de I'auteur et un portrait grave' a
I'eau-forte par A.-M. Lauzet... (Paris, 1893),
p. 263 (author's trans.).

3. See Hulsker, 1980, no. 1652 (The Dance
Hall, Musee d'Orsay, Paris) and no. 1653
(Spectators in the Arena, The Hermitage,
Leningrad).

4. The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh,
2nd ed., translated by Johanna van Gogh-
Bonger and C. de Drood (Greenwich, Conn.,
1959), vol. 3, p. 101, no. 560.

5. Ibid., p. 128, no. 573.

6. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 182, no. 595; see also vol. 2,
p. 591, no. 501.

7. J.-N. Priou, "Van Gogh et la Famille Rou-
lin," Revue des P.T.T. de France, vol. 10, no. 3
(May- June 1955), p. 32.

8. The Complete Letters, 1959, vol. 3, p. 129,
no. 574.

9. Ibid., p. 97, no. 558b.

10. Ibid., pp. 171-72, no. 592.

11. Ibid., p. 129, no. 574.

12. Ibid., p. 127, no. 573.

13. Ibid., p. 129, no. 574.

14. Ibid., pp. 123-24, no. 571a.

15. See Mark Roskill, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and
French Painting of the 1880s: A Catalogue Rai-
sonne of Key Works (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1970),
pp. 83-85.

16. The Complete Letters, 1959, vol. 3, p. 137,
no. 578.

17. John Rewald, Post-Impressionism from Van
Gogh to Gauguin (New York, 1956), p. 240,
n. 52.

18. Mme Roulin, The Saint Louis Art
Museum, Gift of Mrs. Mark C. Steinberg. See
Ronald Pickvance, Van Gogh in Aries (New
York, 1984), no. 137 (repro.).

19. Roskill, 1970, pp. 83-85.

20. For various psychological interpretations,
see Arthur F. Valenstein and Anne Stiles
Wylie, 'A Discussion of the Paper by Marcel
Heiman on 'Psychoanalytic Observations on
the Last Painting and Suicide of Vincent van
Gogh,'" The International Journal ofPsycho-
Analysis, vol. 57 (1976), pp. 82-83.

21. The Complete Letters, 1959, vol. 3, p. 133,
no. 576.

22. Ibid., p. 137, no. 578.

23. Ibid., p. 133, no. 575.

!97

C • .

,5e«.l (to 4« a c » ,, b « en* v»i.(|ti«i I

fig. 154 Vincent van Gogh (Dutch,
1853-1890), Mm? Roulin and Her
Baby, Marcelle, 1888/89, oil on
canvas, 36'4 x 283^" (92 x 73 cm),
Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Bequest of Lisa Norris Elkins

FIG. 155 Vincent van Gogh, C.amilh
Roulin, 1888, oil on canvas, 17 x
1334" (43.2 x 35 cm), Philadelphia
Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs.
Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee

fig. 156 Vincent van Gogh, sketch
of La Berceuse flanked by
"Sunflowers," in a letter to his
brother Theo, May 25, 1889, Rijks-
museum Vincent van Gogh,
Amsterdam

FIG. 157 Vincent van Gogh,
Sunflowers, 1888/89, oil on canvas,
36^ x 289/16" (92 x 72.5 cm), Phila-
delphia Museum of Art, Mr. and
Mrs. Carroll S. Tyson Collection

FIG. 158 Vincent van Gogh, La
Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle),
1889, oil on canvas, 36'^ x 283^"
(92 x 73 cm), Rijksmuseum
Kroller-Miiller, Otterlo

198

Vincent van Gogh

Dutch, 1853-1890

Olive Trees: Pale Blue Sky, 1889

Oil on canvas, 285/8 x 36'4" (72.7 x 92 cm)

provenance: Mme Johanna van Gogh-
Bonger, Amsterdam; Paul Rosenberg Art
Gallery, Paris; Victor Schuster, London; Wil-
denstein and Co., New York; sale, Sotheby's,
London, July 26, 1939, lot 76; W. Feilchen-
feldt Art Gallery, Zurich; private collection;
Reid and Lefevre Art Gallery, London; Sam
Salz Art Gallery, New York.

exhibitions: Stedelijk Museum, Amster-
dam, "Vincent Van Gogh," July-August, 1905,
no. 202; Montross Gallery, New York, "Vin-
cent van Gogh," October 23, 1920, no. 49;
Wildenstein and Co., New York, "French
Masters of the xixth Century," March-April
1927 (no catalogue); City Art Museum, Saint
Louis, 'An Exhibition of Paintings & Prints
by the Masters of Post-Impressionism," April
4-26, 1931, no. 36; The Detroit Institute of
Arts, "Modern French Painting," May 22-
June 30, 1931, no. 47; Los Angeles Museum,
"European Paintings by Old and Modern
Masters: An Exhibition Arranged by Wilden-
stein and Company, Paris, London, New
York," June 13-August 5, 1934, no. 17; Los
Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, "Vincent van
Gogh: A Loan Exhibition of Paintings and
Drawings," July 3-August 1957, no. 16; Phila-
delphia Museum of Art, "Exhibition of Phila-
delphia Private Collectors," summer 1963 (no
catalogue); The Tate Gallery, London, "The
Annenberg Collection," September 2-
October 8, 1969, no. 20.

LITERATURE: Emile Bernard, Lettres de Vin-
cent van Gogh, edited by Ambroise Vollard
(Paris, 1911), pp. 141, 145; J.-B. de la Faille,
L'Oeuvre de Vincent van Gogh: Catalogue rai-
sonne ( Paris and Brussels, 1928), vol. 1,
no. 708 (repro.); W. Scherjon, Catalogue des
tableaux par Vincent van Gogh, decrits dans ses

lettres. Periodes: St. Re'my et Auvers sur Oise
(Utrecht, 1932), no. 8 (repro.); W. Scherjon
and Joseph de Gruyter, Vincent van Gogh's
Great Period: Aries, St. Re'my, and Auvers sur
Oise (Amsterdam, 1937), pp. 210, 268, 271
(repro.); J.-B. de la Faille, The Works of Vincent
van Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings
(Amsterdam and New York, 1970), no. 708
(repro.); Paolo Lecaldano, L'Opera pittorica
completa di Van Gogh e i suoi nessi grafici
(Milan, 1971), vol. 2, no. 738 (repro.): Jan
Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh: Paintings,
Drawings, Sketches (New York, 1980), no. 1855
(repro.); Evert van Uitert, "Vincent van Gogh
and Paul Gauguin in Competition: Vincent's
Original Contribution," Simiolus, vol. 11, no. 2
(1980), n. 83; Naomi E. Maurer, "The Pur-
suit of Spiritual Knowledge: The Philosophi-
cal Meaning and Origins of Symbolist
Theory and Its Expression in the Thought
and Art of Odilon Redon, Vincent van
Gogh, and Paul Gauguin," Ph.D. diss.. Uni-
versity of Chicago, 1985, vol. 1, pp. 790-92;
Ronald Pickvance, Van Gogh in Saint-Remy
and Auvers (New York, 1986), p. 43, fig. 37.

NOTES

1. See Jan Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh:
Paintings, Drawings, Sketches (New York,
ig8o), p. 400, nos. 1758, 1759, 1760.

2. The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh,
2nd ed., translated by Johanna van Gogh-
Bonger and C. de Drood (Greenwich, Conn.,
1959), vol. 3, p. 233, no. 615. In addition to
the Annenberg Olive Trees, the other four are
at the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh,
Amsterdam; The Minneapolis Institute of
Arts; Rijksmuseum K.r6ller-Muller, Otterlo;
Goteborgs Konstmuseum, Sweden; respec-
tively, J.-B. de la Faille, The Works of Vincent
van Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings
(Amsterdam, 1970), nos. 708, 707, 710, 587,
and 586. See Ronald Pickvance, Van Gogh in
Saint-Remy and Auvers (New York, 1986),

p. 161.

3. See Pickvance, 1986, pp. 52-53.

4. Ibid., p. 52.

5. The Complete Letters, 1959, vol. 3, p. 233,
no. 615.

6. Ibid., p. 220, no. 608.

7. See ibid., p. 82, no. 553.

8. Ibid., p. 234, no. 615.

FIG. 159 Emile Bernard (French,
1868-1941), Christ in the Garden of Olives,
1889, oil on canvas, location unknown

fig. 160 Paul Gauguin (French,
1848-1903), sketch for Christ in the
Garden of Olives in a letter to
Vincent van Gogh, November 1889,
Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh,
Amsterdam

199

FIG. 161 Vincent van Gogh (Dutch,
1853-1890), The Starry Night, 1889, oil on
canvas, 29 x 36'4" (737 x 92.1 cm), The
Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., Acquired
through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest

FIG. 162 Vincent van Gogh, Olive Trees: Pale
Blue Sky, 1889, oil on canvas, 285/8 x 3IW4"
(72.7 x 92 cm), The Minneapolis Institute of
Arts, The William Hood Dunwoody Fund

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Dutch, 1853-1890

Women Picking Olives, 1889-90

Oil on canvas, 28v4 x 35'3/i6" (72.5 x 91 cm)

PROVENANCE: Bernard Goudchaux, Paris;
Dikran Khan Kelekian, Paris; sale, American
Art Galleries, New York, January 24, 1922,
lot 157; Wildenstein and Co., New York; Mrs.
Ira Haupt, New York; Basil P. Goulandris,
Lausanne.

exhibitions: Brooklyn Museum, "Paint-
ings by Modern French Masters," 1921,
no. 216; Wildenstein and Co., New York, 'A
Loan Exhibition: Six Masters of Post-
Impressionism," April 8-May 8, 1948, no. 68;
The Cleveland Museum of Art, "Work by
Vincent van Gogh," November 3-December
12, 1948, no. 27; Wildenstein and Co., New
York, "Loan Exhibition: Van Gogh," March
24-April 30, 1955, no. 60; Parke-Bernet Gal-
leries, New York, 'Art Treasures Exhibition,"
June 16-30, 1955, no. 356; The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Foundation, New York, "Van
Gogh and Expressionism," 1964; Knoedler
and Co., New York, "Impressionist Treasures
from Private Collections in New York,"
January 12-29, 1966, no. 12.

literature: Collection Kelekian: Tableaux de
Vecole francaise moderne (Paris and New York,
1920), pi. 69; J.-B. de la Faille, L'Oeuvre de
Vincent van Gogh: Catalogue raisonne (Paris
and Brussels, 1928), vol. 1, no. 655 (repro.);
Louis Pierard, Vincent van Gogh (Paris, 1936),
no. 45, repro.; W. Scherjon, Catalogue des
tableaux par Vincent van Gogh, decrits dans ses
lettres. Periodes: St. Re'my et Auvers sur Oise
(Utrecht, 1932), no. 70 (repro.); W. Scherjon
and Joseph de Gruyter, Vincent van Gogh's
Great Period: Aries, St. Re'my, and Auvers sur
Oise (Amsterdam, 1937), no. 70 (repro.);
Louis Hautecoeur, Van Gogh (Geneva, 1946),
repro. between pp. 80 and 81; Fernando

Puma, Modern Art Looks Ahead (New York,
1947), n.p. (repro.); Werner Weisbach, Vincent
van Gogh: Kunst und Schicksal (Basel, 1951),
vol. 2, pp. 162-63; M- E. Tralbaut, "Twee
onuitgegeven documenten," De Tafelronde,
vol. 2, nos. 8-9 (1955), pp. 7-8; 'Art in
Antiques," Art News, vol. 54, no. 4 (summer
1955), repro. p. 10; John Rewald, Post-
Impressionism from Van Gogh to Gauguin (New
York, 1956), p. 358; H. R. Graetz, The Sym-
bolic Language of Vincent van Gogh (New York,
Toronto, and London, 1963), fig. 86; Charles
Sterling and Margaretta M. Salinger, French
Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art (Greenwich,
Conn., 1967), vol. 3, p. 190; J.-B. de la Faille,
The Works of Vincent van Gogh: His Paintings
and Drawings (Amsterdam and New York,
1970), no. 655 (repro.); Paolo Lecaldano,
L'Opera pittorica completa di Van Gogh e i suoi
nessi grafici (Milan, 1971), vol. 2, no. 744
(repro.); John Rewald, "Should Hoving Be
De-accessioned?" Art in America, vol. 61, no. 1
(January— February 1973), p.28, repro. p. 29;
Matthias Arnold, "Duktus und Bildform bei
Vincent van Gogh," Ph.D. diss., Ruprecht-
Karl University, Heidelberg, 1973, n. 305; Jan
Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh: Paintings,
Drawings, Sketches (New York, 1980), no. 1869
(repro.); Ronald Pickvance, Van Gogh in Saint-
Re'my and Auvers (New York, 1986), p. 304,
repro. p. 306.

NOTES

1. The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, 2nd
ed.. translated by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger
and C. de Drood (Greenwich, Conn., 1959),
vol. 3, p. 232, no. 614a.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., pp. 232-33, no. 614a.

4. Woman Picking Olives, 1889, Collection of
Mr. and Mrs. Basil P. Goulandris, Lausanne.
See J.-B. de la Faille, The Works of Vincent van
Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings (Amster-
dam and New York, 1970), nos. 654, 655, and

2()()

656. See Ronald Pickvance, Van Gogh in
Saint-Remy and Auvers (New York, 1986),
pp. 304, 306.

5. The Complete Letters, 1959, vol. 3, pp. 236-
37, no. 617 (c. December 15, 1889).

6. Ibid., p. 240, no. 619.

7. Ibid., p. 464, no. W18.

8. Ibid., p. 243, no. 621.

9. Ibid., p. 464, no. W17.

10. See Pickvance, 1986, p. 161.

11. The Complete Letters, ig5g, vol. 3, p. 232,
no. 614a.

12. Ibid., p. 237, no. 617.

13. Ibid., p. 240, no. 619.

14. Ibid., p. 465, no. Wig. The drawing sent
to Gauguin seems to be lost. A sketchbook
drawing has been argued to be Van Gogh's
recording of the picture done after he had
reached Auvers, for the purpose of doing a
lithograph on the subject. See Johannes van
der Wolk, The Seven Sketchbooks of Vincent van
Gogh (New York, ig87), pp. 216, 308.

15. The Complete Letters, ig5g, vol. 3, p. 243,
no. 621.

16. Ibid., p. 237, no. 617. His pervading calm
during the winter of i88g-go in Saint-Remy
is discussed by John Rewald, Post-Impression-
ism from Van Gogh to Gauguin (New York,
1956), p. 364.

•1

fig. 163 Vincent van Gogh (Dutch,
i853-i8go), Women Picking Olives (The Olive
Orchard), 18 8g, oil on canvas, 2834 x %6'/4"
(73 x g2 cm), National Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC, Chester Dale Collection

Vincent van Gogh

Dutch, 1853-1890
Vase of Roses, 1890

Oil on canvas, 36V8 x 29V8" (93 x 74 cm)

provenance: Anna van Gogh-Carbentus,
Leyden; Paul Cassirer Art Gallery, Berlin;
Fritz Oppenheim, Berlin; G. Hirschland,
Essen; M. Frank Art Gallery, New York;
Wildenstein and Co., New York; Mrs. Albert
D. Lasker, New York; Harriman Gallery, New
York; Alex Reid and Lefevre Gallery,
London.

exhibitions: Stedelijk Museum, Amster-
dam, "Vincent van Gogh," July-August igo5,
no. 157; Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris,
"Cent tableaux de Vincent van Gogh," Jan-
uary igo8, no. 86; Paul Cassirer Art Gallery,
Berlin, "VII. Austellung," March 5-22, igo8,
no. lg; Paul Cassirer Art Gallery, Berlin,
"Vincent van Gogh," May- June igi4, no. 134;
Paul Cassirer Art Gallery, Berlin, "Vincent
van Gogh: Gemalde," January ig28, no. 71;
Wildenstein and Co., New York, "Master-
pieces from Museums and Private Collec-
tions," November 8-December 15, 1951, no.
55; Orangerie des Tuileries, Paris, "La
Nature morte de l'antiquite a nos jours,"
1952, no. 102; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts,
'An Exhibition of Sixty-Nine Paintings from
the Collection of Mrs. Albert D. Lasker,"
March 6-2g, ig53, no. 37; The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, "Paintings from
Private Collections: Summer Loan Exhibi-
tion," ig5g, no. 54; Wildenstein and Co.,
New York, "Olympia's Progeny: French
Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paint-
ings (1865-^05)," October 28-November
27, ig65, no. 60; Wildenstein and Co., New
York, "Masterpieces in Bloom," April 5-May
5, ig73, no. 27.

literature: Emile Bernard, Lettres de
Vincent van Gogh a Emile Bernard (Paris, lgii),

201

fig. 93; Julius Meier-Graefe, Vincent van
Gogh: A Biographical Study, translated by J. H.
Reece (New York, 1928), fig. 15; J.-B. de la
Faille, L'Oeuvre de Vincent van Gogh: Catalogue
raisonne (Paris and Brussels, 1928), no. 682,
fig. 192; Fritz Knapp, Vincent van Gogh
( Bielefeld and Leipzig, 1930), p. 56, fig. 33;
W. Scherjon, Catalogue des tableaux par Vin-
cent van Gogh, de'crits dans ses lettres. Periodes:
St. Re'my et Auvers sur Oise (Utrecht, 1932), no.
113 (repro.); Walter Pach, Vincent van Gogh,
1853-1890: A Study of the Artist and His Work
in Relation to His Times (New York, 1936),
repro. p. 6; W. Scherjon and Joseph de
Gruyter, Vincent van Gogh's Great Period: Aries,
St. Re'my, and Auvers sur Oise (Amsterdam,
1937), no. 113 (repro.); Alexander Dorner, Vin-
centvan Gogh: Blumen und Landschaften (Ber-
lin, 1937), p. 16, fig. 5: John E. Cross, Vincent
van Gogh (New York, 1947), no. 22 (repro.);
Wallace Brockway, The Albert D. Lasker Collec-
tion, Renoir to Matisse (New York, 1958), p. 27,
repro. p. 28; W. Sandberg, "Rembrandt,
Hokousai Van Gogh," Verve, vol. 7, nos. 27, 28
(1962), repro. p. 56; Charles Sterling, Still
Life Painting from Antiquity to the Present Time,
rev. ed. (New York and Paris, 1959), trans-
lated by James Emmons, pp. 114-15, fig- 100;
J.-B. de la Faille, The Works of Vincent van
Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings (Amster-
dam and New York, 1970), no. 682 (repro.);
Paolo Lecaldano, L'Opera pittorica completa di
Van Gogh e i suoi nessi grafici (Milan, 1971),
vol. 2. no. 793 (repro.); Mall bias Arnold,
"Duktus und Bildform bei Vincent van
Gogh," Ph.D. diss.. Ruprecht-Karl University,
Heidelberg, 1973, nn. 215, 219; Peter Mitch-
ell, Great Flower Painters: Four Centuries of
Floral \rl(\rw York, 1973), p. 124; Jan
1 [ulsker, The Complete Van Gogh: Paintings,
Drawings, Sketches (New York, 1980), p. 450,
no. 1979 (repro.); Ronald Pickvance, Van
Gogh in Saint-Rimy and Auvers (New York,
1986), p. 187, fig. 46; Waller Feilcticnfeldt ,
Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cassirer, Berlin: The
Reception of Van Gogh in Germany from icjii to

1914 (Zwolle, 1988), pp. 29, 112 (repro.).
NOTES

1. The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, 2nd
ed., translated by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger
and C. de Drood (Greenwich, Conn., 1959),
vol. 3, p. 270, no. 634.

2. Release register, archives of the asylum of
Saint-Paul-de Mausole, Saint-Remy; quoted in
Ronald Pickvance, Van Gogh in Saint-Remy
and Auvers (New York, 1986), p. 73 (with a
reproduction of the original register).

3. See Charles Sterling and Margaretta M.
Salinger, French Paintings: A Catalogue of the
Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
(New York, 1967), vol. 3, p. 181, cat. no. 49.41.

4. See Pickvance, 1986, p. 17.

5. The Complete Letters, 1959, vol. 3, p. 469,
no. W21.

6. See Jan Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh:
Paintings, Draivings, Sketches (New York,
1980), p. 452.

7. Ibid., p. 450.

8. See J.-B de la Faille, The Works of Vincent
van Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings (New
York, 1970), nos., 678, 680, 681, and 682.

9. Pickvance, 1986, no. 53 (repro.).

10. The Complete Letters, 1959, vol. 3, p. 269,
no. 633.

11. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 270, no. 634.

12. Paul Cassirer Art Gallery, Berlin, "VII.
Austellung," March 5-22, 1908, no. 19.

13. The Complete Letters, 1959, vol. 3, p. 269,
no. 633.

Edouard Vuillard

French, 1868-1940
The Album, 1895
Signed lower left: E. Vuillard
Oil on canvas, 26n/i6 x &olh"
(67.8 x 204.4 cm)

provenance: Thadee Natanson, Paris;
sale, Hotel Drouot, Paris, June 13, 1908, lot
51; Viennot.

exhibition: Kunstverein, Hamburg, and
Kunsthaus, Zurich, "Vuillard: Gemalde, Pas-
telle, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Druckgra-
phik," June 6-July 26, 1964, no. 88, pi. 94.

LITERATURE: Achille Segard, Peintres
d'aujourd'hui: Les Decor ateurs (Paris, 1914),
vol. 2, p. 320; Andre Chastel, Vuillard,
1868-1940 (Paris, 1946), pp. 53. 115; Rosaline
Bacou, "Decors d'appartements au temps des
Nabis," in Pierre Beres and Andre Chastel,
eds., Art de France. Etudes et chroniques sur
I'art ancien et moderne (Paris, 1964), p. 196;
James Dugdale, "Vuillard the Decorator, I.
The First Phase: the 1890s," Apollo, vol. 81,
no. 36 (February 1965), p. 97; Jan Lauts and
Werner Zimmermann, Katalog Neuere Meister,
19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Karlsruhe, 1972), vol.
2, no. 2520; Claire Freches-Thory, "Jardins
Publics de Vuillard," La Revue du Louvre et
des Muse'es de France, vol. 2g (1979), p. 312,
n. 18; Wildenstein and Co., New York, La
Revue Blanche: Paris in the Days of Post-Impres-
sionism and Symbolism (New York, 1983), p. 9
(repro.); Claire Freches-Thory and Antoine
Terrasse, Les Nabis (Paris, 1990), nos. 124-25
(repro.).

NOTES

1. Collection Thadee Natanson: Catalogue de la
vente publique (Paris, 1908), no. 51 (author's
trans.).

2. John Russell, Edouard Vuillard, 1868-1940
( I ondon, 1971), p. 53.

2<)2

3- Albert Aurier, "Le Symbolisme en Pein-
ture," Mercure de France, March 15, 1891, pp.
155—65; quoted in Andrew Carnduff Rit-
chie, Edouard Vuillard (New York, 1954),
p. 19.

4. Quoted in Ritchie, 1954, pp. 19-20.

5. For information on the actor, playwright,
and producer Aurelien Lugne-Poe, see Patri-
cia Eckert Boyer, "The Nabis, Parisian Van-
guard Humorous Illustrators, and the Circle
of the Chat Noir," in Patricia Eckert Boyer,
ed., The Nabis and the Parisian Avant-Garde
(New Brunswick and London, 1988), pp. 33,
g6; and Belinda Thomson, Vuillard (New
York, 1988), p. 84.

6. See Rosaline Bacou, "Decors d'apparte-
ments au temps des Nabis," in Pierre Beres
and Andre Chastel, eds., Art de France: Etudes
et chroniques sur I'art ancien et moderne (Paris,
1964), pp. 193-96.

7. Thomson, 1988, pp. 36-39.

8. Quoted in John Rewald, The John Hay Whit-
ney Collection (Washington, D.C., 1983), p. 81.

9. The other two are Conversation ( Pot de
gres), oil on canvas, 25V16 x 45"/i6", in a pri-
vate collection, and Dressing Table (Dans les
fleurs), oil on canvas, 25V16 x 467/8", also in a
private collection. They are reproduced in
Claude Roger Marx, Vuillard: His Life and
Work, translated by E. B. d'Auvergne (Lon-
don, 1946), p. 133.

10. These unpublished notes are in the pos-
session of Antoine Salomon, who is prepar-
ing the definitive work on Vuillard. They
were graciously shared with me by Elizabeth
Easton.

11. See A. Cold and R. Fizcale, The Life of
Misia Sert(New York and London, 1980).

12. Russell, 1971, p. 55.

13. The photograph is reproduced in the
exhibition catalogue from Wildenstein and
Co., La Revue Blanche: Paris in the Days of
Post-Impressionism and Symbolism (New York,
^83 ). P- 13-

14. Reproduced in ibid., p. 9. Antoine Salo-
mon has identified this billiard room as
being not in the Paris apartment, but, rather,
in the summer house, Le Relais, at Ville-
neuve-sur-Yonne, which Thadee and Misia
rented from 1897. This information was
kindly relayed by Elizabeth Easton.

15. Andre Cide, "Promenade au Salon
d'Automne," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 47th year,
3rd period, vol. 34 (December 1905), p. 480;
quoted in Stuart Preston, Edouard Vuillard
(London, 1985), p. 37.

FIG. 164 Edouard Vuillard (French,
1868-1940), Self-Portrait with Sister,
c. 1892, oil on paper on card-
board, 9 x 6'/»" (23 x 16.5 cm),
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The
Louis E. Stern Collection

FIG. 165 Edouard
Vuillard, Under the Trees,
from the series "The
Public Gardens," 1894,
tempera on canvas, 84V2 x
383/s" (214.6 x 97.5 cm).
The Cleveland Museum of
Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund

fig. 166 Edouard
Vuillard, Embroidering by
the Window, from the
Thadee Natanson series,
oil on canvas, 693/8 x 259/16"
(176 x 65 cm), The
Museum ol Modern Art,
N.Y., Estate of John Hay
Whitne)

FIG. 168 Edouard Vuillard, The Dressing
Table (Among the Flowers), from the Thadee
Natanson series, 1895, oil on canvas, 25V16 x
467/8" (65 x 119 cm), private collection

FIG. 167 Edouard Vuillard, Woman
in a Striped Dress, from the Thadee
Natanson series, 1895, oil on
canvas, 27V8 x 23'/8" (65.7 x 58.7 cm),
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C., Collection of
Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

FIG. 169 Edouard Vuillard, The Room with the
Three Lamps, 1899, tempera on canvas, 22Vs x
37" (58 x 94 cm), Gustav Zumsteg Collec-
tion, Zurich

FIG. 170 Edouard Vuillard, Misia,
Vallotton, and Thadee Natanson,
1899, oil on board, 27V8 x 2o'/,6" (69
x 51 cm), William Kelly Simpson
(lolled ion, Katonah, N.Y.

204

FIG. 171 Edouard Vuillard, Misia
Playing the Piano and Cipa Listening,
c. 1897, oil on board, 25 x 22'/i6"
(63.5 x 56 cm), Staatliche Kunst-
lialle, Karlsruhe

FIG. 172 Photograph of Thadee
Natanson playing billiards with Ida
Godebska (courtesy Antoine
Salomon)

Edouard Vuillard

French, 1868-1940

Romain Coolus and Mme Hessel,

1900-1905
Signed lower right: E Vuillard
Oil on cardboard affixed to canvas,

14'/, x 223/8" (36.8 x 56.8 cm)

exhibitions: Philadelphia Museum of Art,
"Exhibition of Philadelphia Private Collec-
tors," summer 1963 (no catalogue); The Tate
Gallery, London, "The Annenberg Collec-
tion," September 2-October 8, 1969, no. 32.

NOTES

1. Claude Roger Marx, Vuillard: His Life and
Work, translated by E. B. dAuvergne (Lon-
don, 1946), p. 90.

2. See Evelyn Nattier-Natanson, Les Amities de
la Revue Blanche et quelques autres ( Vin-
cennes, 1959), p. 116.

3. See Dictionnaire de biographic francaise,
vol. 9, s.v. "Coolus."

4. Annette Vaillant, Autour de la Revue
Blanche (Paris, 1966), p. 121; quoted in John
Russell, Edouard Vuillard, 1868-1940 (Lon-
don, 1971), p. lai.

FIG. 175 Edouard Vuillard, The
Widow's Visit, 1899, oil on paper on
panel, 1934 x 24^4" (50.2 x 62.9 cm),
The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

FIG. 173 Edouard Vuillard (French,
1868-1940), Mme Hessel, c. 1905, oil
on cardboard, 42'/^ x 3034" (106.2 x
78 cm), private collection

FIG. 174 Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec (French, 1864-1901),
Romain Coolus, 1899, on on
cardboard, 2i5/s x 13*4" (55 x 35 cm),
Musee Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi

Pablo Picasso

Spanish, 1881-1973

.4/ the Lapin Agile, 1905

Oil on canvas, 39 x 3.9^" (99 x 100.3 cm)

provenance: Frederic Gerard, Paris,
1905; Alfred Flechtheim, Berlin, 1912; Rolf
de Mare, Stockholm; Cesar de Haucke, New
York, and Hector Brame, Paris, June 10-
August 5, 1952; Knoedler and Co., New
York; Mrs. Charles S. Payson, Manhasset,
New York, acquired in September 1952; sale,
Sotheby's, New York, November 15, 1989,
lot 31.

exhibitions: Musee Cantini, Marseille,
"Picasso," 1959, no. 6; Knoedler and Co.,
New York, "Picasso, an American Tribute,"
1962, no. lb; Dallas Museum of Art,
"Picasso," 1967, no. 8; Wildenstein and Co.,
New York, "Modern Portraits: The Self and
Others," 1976, pp. 127-29, no. 94; Kyoto
Municipal Museum and Isetan Museum of
\i t. [bkyo, "The Joan Whitney Payson Col-
let t ion." 1980, no. 66.

literature: Karl Asplund, Rolf de Mare's
Travelsamling (Stockholm, 1923), pi. 22;
Denys Sutton, Picasso, Peintures epoques bleue
et rose (Paris, 1948), no. 38; Roland Penrose,
Portrait of Picasso (New York, 1956; reprint.
New York, 1971), p. 37, no. 71; Christian
Zervos, Pablo Picasso; vol. 1 ( Paris, 1957),
p. 120, no. 275; Roland Peni ose, Picasso: His
Life and Work (London, 1958), no. 7, pi. 1;
Raymond Cogniat, Picasso: Figures (Lau-
sanne. 1959), frontispiece; Anthony Blunt
and Phoebe Pool, Picasso, The Formative Years:
A Study of His Sources (London, 1962), no. 137;
John Berger, Success and Failure of Picasso
(London and Baltimore, 1965), p. 44; Hans
L. C.Jaffe, Pablo Picasso, translated by Nor-
berl Guterman (New York, 1964), pp. 72-73;
Ronald Alley, Picasso, The Three Dancers: The
48th Charlton Lecture (Newcastle upon Tyne,
1967), p. 19, fig. 7; Pierre Daix, Georges Bou-

daille, and Joan Rosselet, Picasso: The Blue
and Rose Periods: A Catalogue Raisonne of the
Paintings, igoo-1906, translated by Phoebe
Pool (Greenwich, Conn., 1967), p. 253, pi.
xii. 23; Douglas Cooper, Picasso Theatre (New
York, 1968), p. 16, pi. 35; Paulo Lecaldano
and Alberto Moravia, L'opera completa di
Picasso blu e rosa (Milan, 1968), no. 197, pi.
XL; Theodore Reff, "Harlequins, Saltimban-
ques, Clowns, and Fools," Artforum, vol. 10
(October 1971), p. 36, fig. 10; Theodore Reff,
"Themes of Love and Death in Picasso's
Early Work," in Picasso in Retrospect, edited
by Roland Penrose and John Golding(New
York and Washington, D.C., 1973), p- 33, pi-
33; Marv Mathews Gedo, Picasso: Art as Auto-
biography (Chicago and London, 1980), pis.
63, 65; E. A. Carmean, Jr., Picasso: The Saltim-
banques (Washington, DC, 1980), pp. 29, 87,
pi. 2; Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso: The Farly
Years 1881-igoj, translated by Kenneth Lyons
(Barcelona, 1985), p. 393, no. 1012; Ronald
Alley, Picasso: The Three Dancers (London,
1986), p. 21, fig. 35.

notes

1. Quoted by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, in
Picasso in Retrospect, edited by Roland
Penrose and John Colding (New York and
Washington, D.C., 1973), p. 7

2. The execution of At the Lapin Agile stands
in direct contrast to another ambitious pic-
ture of that year on the Harlequin subject,
the so-called Wedding of Pierrette (sale,
Drouot Montaigne, Binoche & Godeau,
Paris, November 30, 1989), in which the
intensity of the blue lines is almost completely
consumed into a thinning wash of greens and
blues to the point that the surface is masked
by blurred runs of paint. This technique is
present here only in the lower right-hand
cornel, where Picasso, in bloc king in the
shadow under the Harlequin's left arm after
completing the drawing, allowed the thinned
brown paint to flow over the hand, which it
p,u t iall) dissolves.

3. Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, vol. 1
(Paris, 1957), p. 120, no. 275.

4. Picasso and Ramon Pichot decorated a
room at Frede's earlier bar, called the Zut and
were on close terms with Frede. See Jaime
Sabartes, Picasso: An Intimate Portrait, trans-
lated by Angel Flores (New York, 1948),

pp. 70-83.

5. Francoise Gilot reported a visit she and
Picasso made to Frede in the late 1940s at the
Lapin Agile just before he died. See Fran-
coise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso
(New York, Toronto, and London, 1964),

pp. 70-72.

6. The other introduction of himself as Har-
lequin appears in the large Family of Saltim-
banques, National Gallery of Art, Washing-
ton, D.C, Chester Dale Collection (see E. A.
Carmean, Jr., Picasso: The Saltimbanques
[Washington, D.C, 1980]).

7. John Richardson, ed., Picasso: An American
Tribute (New York, 1962), no. 16, section 1.

8. For the most complete survey of informa-
tion on Germaine Pichot and Casagemas, see
Theodore Reff, "Themes of Love and Death
in Picasso's Early Work," in Picasso in Retro-
spect, edited by Roland Penrose and John
Golding (New York and Washington DC,
10-73)> PP- y-28-

9. Pierre Daix, Georges Boudaille, and Joan
Rosselet, Picasso: The Blue and Rose Periods: A
Catalogue Raisonne of the Paintings,
ic)oo-it)o6, translated by Phoebe Pool
(Greenwich, Conn., 1967), p. 194, no. Vl.4

10. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of
Hanna Fund. Ibid., pp. 222-23, no. ix.13.

11. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice
B. Toklas (New York, 1933), pp. 29-30, 33.

12. He first discussed this in Picasso, 'The
Three Dancers: The 48th Charlton Lecture
([Newcastle upon Tyne, 1967], p. 17), and
expanded upon this in Picasso: The Three
Dancers (London, 1986), pp. 14-16.

13. Gilot and Lake, 1964, p. 74.

2()()

14. 'Above all, and this is quite curious, the
painting of Toulouse Lautrec greatly inter-
ested him ..." Gertrude Stein, Picasso (New
York and London, 1946), p. 5.

15. Quoted in Denis Thomas, Picasso and His
Art (London, Sydney, New York, and
Toronto, 1975), p. 28.

16. Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait, 1906, Phila-
delphia Museum of Art, A. E. Gallatin Col-
lection. See Mark Rosenthal, "The Nietzs-
chean Character of Picasso's Early
Development," Arts, vol. 55 (October 1980),
pp. 87-91.

17. It is the same device, man both with and
against woman, he used two years later in the
figure of the sailor in the brothel of the
Demoiselles dAvignon, Museum of Modern
Art, New York. See Helene S. Seckel, Les
Demoiselles dAvignon, 3 vols. (Paris, 1988).

FIG. 176 Photograph of At the Lapin
Agile hanging in the cafe. The
proprietor, Frede Gerard, is seated
on the right (courtesy Sotheby's,
New York)

FIG. 177 Pablo Picasso (Spanish,
1881-1973), Frede Gerard, ink on
paper, Musee Picasso, Paris

fig. 178 Carlos Casagemas
(Spanish, 1870-1901), Germaine
Pichot, ink on paper, location
unknown

HENRI MATISSE

French, 1869-1954

Odalisque with Gray Trousers, 1927

Signed lower right: Henri Matisse

Oil on canvas, 25V8 x 32" (65.1 x 81.5 cm)

provenance: Purchased from the artist by
Mrs. Ira Haupt, New York.

exhibitions: Victoria and Albert
Museum, London, "Exhibition of Paintings
by Picasso and Matisse," December 1945, no.
7; The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
"Henri Matisse," November 13, 1951-January
13, 1952, also shown at The Cleveland
Museum of Art, February 5-March 16, 1952,
The Art Institute of Chicago, April l-May 4,
1952, and The San Francisco Museum of
Art. May 22- July 6, 1952, no. 61.

literature: Jean Cassou, Matisse (Lon-
don, 1948), no. 5 (repro.); Andre Lejard,
Matisse (Paris, 1952), no. 7 (repro.); Raymond
Escholier, Matisse: A Portrait of the Artist and
the Man (New York, i960), p. 13, repro. p. 128;
Susan Lambert, Matisse Lithographs (London,
1972), cited in no. 47; Musee National d'Art
Moderne, Paris, Henri Matisse: Dessins et
sculpture (Paris, 1975), cited in no. 76.

NOTES

1. The screen in Odalisque with Gray Trousers
can be seen in a photograph of Matisse's stu-
dio. See Jack Cowartand Dominique Four-
cade, Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice,
icjiCi-igjo (Washington, DC, 1986), p. 31,

% 3°-

2. First cited in Verve, vol. 1, no. 3, p. 125.

3. Pierre Schneider, Matisse, translated by
Michael Taylor and Bridget Strevens Romer
(New York, 1984), pp. 523-28.

4. For example, compare Cowart and
Fourcade, 1986, fig. 169; and Jean Cassou,
Matisse (London, 1948), no. 15.

207

5- The painting has been dated 1918 (Cassou
1948, no. 5), 1925 (Andre Lejard, Matisse
[Paris, 1952], no. 7), and 1928 (The Museum
of Modern Art, New York, Henri Matisse
[New York, 1951], no. 61).
6. Musee National dArt Moderne, Paris,
Matisse: Dessins et sculpture (Paris, 1975),
p. 118.

fig. 179 Photograph of Henri
Matisse drawing Henriette
Darricarrere, third-floor apartment
and studio, 1 place Charles-Felix,
Nice, c. 1928 (courtesy The
Museum of Modern Art, New York)

fig. 180 Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954),
Seated Odalisque, Ornamental Ground, Flowers,
and Fruit, 1927, pen and ink on paper, ios/s x
15" (27.5 x 38 cm), Collection Gerard Matisse

FIG. 181 Henri Matisse, Odalisque, Brazier,
and Cup of Fruit, 1929, lithograph, 11 x 147/8"
(28 x 37.8 cm), Victoria and Albert Museum,
London

PIERRE BONNARD

French, 1867-1947

Meadow in Bloom, c. 1935

Studio stamp lower right: Bonnard

Oil on canvas, 35^4 x 355/8" (90.2 x 90.5 cm)

exhibitions: Royal Academy of Arts, Lon-
don, "Pierre Bonnard, 1867-1947," winter
1966, no. 229; The Tate Gallery, London,
"The Annenberg Collection," September 2-
October 8, 1969, no. 1.

literature: Jean Bouret, Bonnard Seduc-
tions (Lausanne, 1967), p. 43, no. 20 (repro.);
Jean and Henry Dauberville, Bonnard (1920-
39; Paris, 1973), vol. 3, no. 1530 (repro.), as
"Lejardin."

FIG. 182 Pierre Bonnard (French,
1867-1947), The Table, 1925, oil on
canvas, 40'/* x 293/8" (103 x 74.3 cm),
The Tate Gallery, London

208

NOTES

1. The painting is titled "Le Jardin" in the
catalogue raisonne; see Jean and Henry
Dauberville, Bonnard (1920-39; Paris, 1973),
vol. 3, no. 1530.

2. Reproduced in Sasha M. Newman, ed.,
Bonnard: The Late Paintings (London, 1984),
no. 51.

3. Jean Clair, Bonnard (Paris, 1975), n.p.;
quoted in Newman, ed., 1984, p. 172.

4. In 1936; quoted in Newman, ed., 1984,
p. 70.

5. Quoted in ibid., p. 69.

6. Ibid.

7. See, for example, Dauberville, 1973,
no. 1505.

Georges Braque

French, 1882-1963
Boats on the Beach at L'Estaque, 1906
Signed and dated lower right: G Braque
06

Oil on canvas, 15 x i8'/8" (38.2 x 46.1 cm)

provenance: C. P. Curran, Dublin; Mrs.
Ira Haupt, New York.

exhibitions: Royal Scottish Academy,
Edinburgh, and The Tate Gallery, London,
"G. Braque," August 18-November 11, 1956,
no. 7; Saidenberg Gallery, New York,
"Georges Braque, 1882-1963: An American
Tribute," April 7-May 2, 1964, no. 5.

literature: John Richardson, ed., Georges
Braque, 1882-1963: An American Tribute
(New York, 1964), no. 5 (repro.).

NOTES

1. In contrast to all other accounts, John
Elderfield insists that this moment of revela-
tion occurred at the 1906 Salon d'Automne,
in The "Wild Beasts": Fauvism and Its Affinities
(New York, 1976), p. 83.

2. Quoted in Henry R. Hope, Georges Braque
(New York, 1949), p. 21.

3. Braque stayed at L'hotel Maurin, accord-
ing to Nadine Pouillon and Isabelle Monod-
Fontaine in Braque: Oeuvres de Georges Braque
(1882-1963) (Paris, 1982), p. 20.

4. Elderfield (1976, p. 83) proposed that
Derain probably suggested Braque's trip to
L'Estaque, although most accounts of
Braque's life record that he did not meet
Derain until the 1907 Salon des Indepen-
dants. When asked whether the inspiration
for the trip to L'Estaque was Cezanne,
Braque agreed (Pouillon and Monod-Fon-
taine, 1982, p. 18).

5. The French quotation is cited in Pouillon
and Monod-Fontaine, 1982, p. 18. The
English translation is from Youngna Kim,

"The Early Works of Georges Braque, Raoul
Dufy, and Othon Friesz: Le Havre Group
of Painters," Ph.D. diss., Ohio State Univer-
sity, Columbus, 1980, p. 151.

6. Pouillon and Monod-Fontaine, 1982, p. 24.
Virtually none of the paintings of this period
are dated, and no firm chronology of the
L'Estaque canvases exists.

7. The use of an accentuated boat structure
can be seen as early as Ship in Harbor, Le
Havre, 1902 (Marie-Louise Jeanneret Collec-
tion, Geneva) or The Barges, 1906 (Fridart
Foundation, Geneva), and has been discussed
by Kim, 1980, pp. 112-13. The pier was used
in The Bay of Antwerp, 190b (private collec-
tion, Liechtenstein).

FIG. 183 Georges Braque (French,
1882-1963), L'Estaque, 1906, oil on canvas,
195/8 x 233^" (50 x 60 cm), Musee National
d'Art Moderne, Paris

209

FIG. 184 Georges Braque, L'Estaque, Wharf,
1906, oil on canvas, i5'4 x 18" (38.5 x 46 cm),
Musee National d Art Moderne, Paris

FIG. 186 Georges Braque, The Great
Trees, L'Estaque, 1906-7, oil on
canvas, 325/8 x 28" (83 x 71 cm),
private collection

fig. 185 Georges Braque, The Port of Antwerp,
1906, oil on canvas, 193^ x 24" (50 x 61 cm),
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Georges Braque

French, 1882-1963
The Studio, 1939
Signed lower left: G. Braque 39
Oil on canvas, 4472 x 57'/4"
(113 x 146.1 cm)

provenance: Paul Rosenberg & Co., New
York; Lucille Ellis Simon, Los Angeles.

exhibitions: The Museum of Modern
Art, New York, and The Cleveland Museum
of Art, Georges Braque, January 25- June 12,
1949, no. 75; Royal Scottish Academy,
Edinburgh, and The Tate Gallery, London,
Georges Braque: An Exhibition of Paintings,
August 18-November 11, 1956, no. 76;
Musee du Louvre, Paris, LAtelier de Braque,
November 1961, no. 36; Public Education
Association, New York, Georges Braque,
1882-1963: An American Tribute, April 7-May
2, 1964, no. 42; Pierre Matisse Gallery, New
York, Seven Decades, 1895-1965: Crosscurrents
in Modern Art, April 26-May 21, 1966, no.
229; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York, Georges Braque, June-September
1988, no. 57.

LITERATURE: John Richardson, "The
Ateliers of Braque," The Burlington Magazine,
vol. 97, no. 627 (June 1955), p. 167, fig. 4;
Maurice Gieure, G. Braque (Paris and New
York, 1956), pp. 55-56, pi. 95; John Russell,
G. Braque (London, 1959), no. 55 (repro.);
Galerie Maeght, Paris, Catalogue de I'oeuvre
de Georges Braque: Peintures 1936-1941 (Paris,
1961), p. 59 (repro.); Jean Leymarie, Braque
(Paris, 1961), p. 90 (repro.); Stanislas Fumet,
Georges Braque (Paris, 1965), p. 122 (repro.);
Edwin Mullins, Braque (London, 1968), no.
130, p. 171 (repro.); Douglas Cooper, Braque:
The Great Years (Chicago, 1972), p. 78, fig. 61;
John Russell, The Meaning of Modern Art
(New York, 1974), p. 283 (repro.); Raymond
Cognaite, Georges Braque (New York,
1980), no. 36, p. 138 (repro.).

2IO

NOTES

1. The studio paintings were first discussed as
a series by John Richardson, in "The Ateliers
of Braque," The Burlington Magazine, vol. 97,
no. 627 (June 1955), pp. 164-70. Drawing on
discussions with the artist, he placed them in
chronological sequence from 1949 to 1955,
assigning roman numerals to the eight works.
The present picture, while not in the num-
bered series, was the point of departure

for it, and its role as a precursor has been
accepted by all subsequent scholars address-
ing the issue.

2. Private collection; see Bernard Zurcher,
Georges Braque: Life and Work, translated by
Simon Nye (New York, 1988), p. 249.

3. Private collection; ibid., p. 177.

4. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David Lloyd
Kreeger, Washington, DC; ibid., p. 173.

5. See Richardson, 1955, p. 165, n. 4.

6. Cahier de Georges Braque, 1917-1947 (Paris,
1948), n.p. "II n'est en art qu'une chose qui
vaille; celle que Ton ne peut expliquer."

7. See Jean Cassou, Preface in Henry R.
Hope, Georges Braque (New York, 1949), p. 9.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1 he opportunity to present the Annenberg Collection at
the Philadelphia Museum of Art was both a privilege and a chal-
lenge. A privilege, because we came to know the collection very
well, having been able to study and examine the paintings in an
idyllic environment before research on the catalogue got under-
way. A challenge, because the collection has been neither exhib-
ited nor published'as a whole— in the 1963 Philadelphia Museum
of Art exhibition there were thirteen paintings on display, and in
the io,6g Tate Gallery exhibition there were thirty-two paintings —
and the opportunity to catalogue each work in a rather short period
of time was daunting indeed. Given the enormous interest in Impres-
sionist and Post-Impressionist art, and the blossoming of art-histori-
cal study in this field, the amount of material to be sifted and consid-
ered seemed overwhelming. Although nearly every work in the
collection was familiar as a "textbook" example (in that dulling
phrase), the paintings had not been studied in depth for many years,
with the exception of three Gauguins, which were lent to the Gau-
guin retrospective of 1988 at the National Gallery of Art, Washing-
ton, D.C. Our entries, which sometimes stray rather far from the
conventional model of the catalogue entry, bring together as much
of the literature as we have been able to discover. Furthermore, by
focusing attention on the paintings themselves and taking care to
describe and discuss their physical state as well as to consider their
art-historical importance, it is our hope that the catalogue will serve
as a starting point for future investigation.

Our labors, although concentrated, spanned a relatively short
time, and our efforts have depended upon the generosity and assis-
tance of many people. From the beginning, we profited from the
sensitive and pertinent insights of Mark Tucker, Conservator of
Paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He helped us look
harder and see better: many observations originated in early discus-
sions witli him as we surveyed each work in turn together. He also
read through the text and clarified several issues for us.

Work on the catalogue itself was a genuinely departmental effort.
Veerle Thielemans assisted in the compilation of material and the
( he( king <>l data. She has proved to be an ideal research assistant:
thorough, inventive, and unrelenting in her quest for references and
( nations. We have benefited from discussions with her during the
writing of the text. The herculean task of typing the manuscript,
ordering photographs, and coordinating the many departments in-
\ol\cd 111 1 Ins project has been supervised efficiently and graciously
by Margaret Quigley, Administrative Assistant in the Department of
European Painting. Laura Davidheiser began typing and arranging
the manuscript text, and her good work was taken over by Lisa
Titus, Clerical Assistant in the Department of European Painting, to
whom we are particularly indebted for her enthusiasm and capac ity
to organize in the face of extreme pressure. For nine months we
monopolized the Library at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and we
owe a great debt of thanks to all members of the Library staff for
theii tolerance and support in this enforced takeover. Under the

genial supervision of Barbara Sevy, former Librarian, the staff coped
with an avalanche of interlibrary-loan requests and research ques-
tions. Lilah Mittelstaedt searched far and wide for our references,
and Gina Erdreich placed computer systems at our disposal in the
checking of bibliographic material and sales history.

The Publications Department, under the caring and exacting eye
of George Marcus, coped with a devastating deadline to create a
catalogue worthy of the Annenberg Collection. The best of all start-
ing points came in the splendid color photography taken by Graydon
Wood, Museum Photographer, who produced color transparencies
of the highest quality. We are especially grateful to Jane Watkins,
Senior Editor, for her conscientious and untiring supervision of the
editing of this catalogue: firm, yet enthusiastic, she clarified our
arguments and dignified our prose in many ways. In this she was
assisted by Mary Patton and Molly Ruzicka, whose attention to detail
and alertness to style were unwavering. Joseph B. Del Valle produced
the elegant design for the catalogue.

In the course of writing and undertaking the research for this
catalogue we have relied upon many people outside the Museum,
who answered increasingly urgent requests with unfailing precision
and generosity. We would particularly like to mention the contribu-
tions of John Rewald, without whose assistance the entries on Ce-
zanne would be much diminished, and Michael Pantazzi, who shared
crucial unpublished material relating to works by Degas. Ay-Wang
Hsia and Joseph Baillio at Wildenstein, New York, responded to
countless requests and questions and were especially helpful in re-
trieving photographs. David Ball, Chief Conservator at the National
Gallery of Art, arranged for critical X-radiograph photography to
be taken of Gauguin's Siesta. We are also indebted to the following
people for their help in many ways: William Acquavella, Chittima
Amot npichetkul, Hortense Anda-Buhrle, Dilys Blum, Jean Suther-
land Boggs, Philippe Brame, Harry Brooks, Linda Brooks, David
Bull, Christopher Burge, Francoise Cachin, Beverly Carter, Des-
mond Corcoran, Francois Daulte, Mine Ch. Demeulenaere, Anne
Distel, Carol Dowd, Elizabeth Easton, Jean Edmonson, Marianne
Feilchenfeldt, Walter Feilchenfeldt, Caroline Durand-Ruel Godfrey,
Morton J. Gordon, Robert Gordon, Sir Lawrence Cowing, Anne
Higonnet, Elizabeth (anus, David Lloyd Kreeger, Ronald de Leouw,
Suzanne Lindsay, Nancy Little, Teresa Longyear, Ann Tz.eutschler
Lurie, Bronwyn T. Maloney, Daniel Martinez, Paul Mitchell, Charles
Moffett, Pierre Mouzay, Alexandra Murphy, Peter Nathan, Anne
Norton, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Theodore Reff, Antoine
Salomon, Anne Schirrmeister, Robert Sc hmidt, William Scott.
George Shackelford, Innis Howe Shoemaker, William Kelly Simpson,
lone Skedsmo, Charles Stuckey, Irene Taurins, Gary Tinterow,
fayne Warman, Suzanne F. Wells, Barbara Ehrlich White, Mic hael
Wilson, Juliet Wilson-Barreau, Alan P. Wintermute, Michael Zakian,
the staff ol the New York Public Library, (he Pierpont Morgan
Library, the staff of the Durand-Ruel Archives, and the Department
of Rights and Reproductions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

212

y -■

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